A novel dynamic business model to quantify the effects of policy intervention on solid waste recycling industry: A case study on phosphogypsum recycling in Yichang, China

Business model is a conceptual framework about value creation, management innovation, and strategy execution in organizations. As an important tool to promote the industry development and corporation governance, business model has been widely applied to study the foundation and development of waste recycling and utilization industry, only qualitatively. In this paper, by integrating system dynamics into an adapted business model canvas, a novel dynamic business model (DBM) is constructed to thoroughly diagnose the causal connections among the blocks of business model canvas, and systematically and numerically value the output of comprehensive performance, which is especially suitable for evaluating the impacts of policy intervention on industry development, quantitatively. In search of proper policy intervention with effective and positive impacts on the development of solid waste recycling industry, this novel DBM was then applied to phosphogypsum (PG) recycling in Yichang to analyze the behaviors of various subjects, including government, enterprises, and consumers, in the market of PG recycling. To effectively assess the development of PG recycling, there are two subsystems, production and distribution, within this novel DBM to quantitatively simulate the effects and effectiveness of policy intervention under four different policy scenarios, mandatory policy, technology-driven policy, promoting policy, and mixed policy. Affected by the synergy effects of diverse policies, the profit of PG recycling can be significantly increased to reach 2.94 × 109 CNY (12.02 times higher than that under mandatory policy), market vitality can be truly boosted, and the rate of PG recycling can also be remarkably raised by 3.94 times to greatly promote the sustainable development of PG recycling. This novel DBM can effectively promote industry development by quantifying the values and effects of policy intervention on the development of solid waste recycling industry. •An innovative DBM was constructed by integrating system dynamics into business model canvas.•The DBM quantitatively simulated the effects of policy intervention on PG recycling industry.•Various policies had positive impacts on the development of PG recycling industry.•The synergy effects of mixed policies were overwhelming.