Designing circular beverage container networks under curbside and deposit refund systems for refillable glass and PET bottles

This research addresses the environmental challenges of beverage container waste by simultaneously examining refillable glass and single-use PET bottle systems under curbside and deposit refund system (DRS) collection mechanisms. While most existing studies primarily focus on collection or recycling rates, limited attention has been given to operational constraints, material quality, and internal losses affecting refillable glass reuse and PET bottle-to-bottle recycling. Therefore, a coexistence circular economy supply chain network is proposed considering contamination, breakage, degradation, transportation and storage losses, and defective production under both curbside and DRS collection systems. The problem is formulated as a bi-objective mixed-integer linear programming model aiming to minimize total cost while maximizing high-value circularity through refillable glass reuse and PET bottle-to-bottle recycling. Using data extracted from a Mexico City pilot case study, the model is solved through the augmented ε-constraint (AEC) method and evaluated under different operational scenarios. The results indicate that DRS superiority is conditional rather than universal and depends strongly on collection quality, consumer participation, and regional operational conditions. Refillable glass systems show higher sensitivity to contamination, breakage, and degradation, where DRS significantly improves reuse feasibility up to 274.47% compared to curbside collection. Additionally, increasing high-value circularity from 23 to 62% reduces dependence on virgin PET preforms and glass bottles by 45.88%. The findings further demonstrate that curbside and DRS systems can operate complementarily under different operational conditions to support circular waste management and contribute to SDG 12, SDG 11, and SDG 13 by improving resource efficiency and reducing dependence on virgin materials.