Discarded furniture constitutes a significant share of bulky waste directed to landfills and incinerators each year in the USA. This has implications for resource consumption, social equity, and other sustainability concerns. Reuse of furniture provides a strategy for waste prevention and enables product life extension and offset of new consumption as part of a circular economy (CE). Using online platforms (e.g., Facebook, Craigslist), users can connect directly to acquire and/or discard used furniture items that would otherwise be disposed. Much of the existing literature focuses on an individual's motivations for disposing/acquiring used products, and not on the mechanics and/or practice of reuse. This study explores reuse practices, perspectives, and individual engagement in the local reuse of furniture through user-to-user (U2U) online platforms using two data sources and methodologies. To understand the characteristics of used furniture available for local reuse via U2U online platforms, web-scraping was conducted on Craigslist posts over a four-month period to collect data regarding furniture type, condition, and location. In parallel, individuals were invited to complete a questionnaire regarding their use of U2U online platforms for acquiring/disposing of used furniture, perceived convenience of using online platforms, and the extent to which reuse transactions were 'local'. This study found that the product type, perceived convenience, and access to information played key roles in the local reuse of furniture. This study has important implications for sustainable consumption systems in a local circular economy. / Master of Science / Every year, millions of tons of furniture is disposed as bulky waste in landfills. The discarded furniture can cover eight thousand football fields with couches, mattresses, and tables. Previous studies show about half of the discarded items can be used again. Reuse is one of the solutions to the furniture waste problem. Depending on where you live, it is now possible to easily match someone who is discarding furniture with someone else who wants to obtain it. This is how the internet enables anyone to participate in furniture reuse. The study looks at how and what types of furniture is being reused locally, i.e., acquired, and discarded for reuse all within twenty-five miles or lesser. The study also seeks to answer how people perceive the use of online platforms for the local reuse of furniture. The research shows that the type of furniture (e.g., chair, table, mattress), convenience of reuse through online platforms, and information about the used furniture item are central to furniture reuse. The results help in understanding what factors promote or hinder the local reuse of furniture, which is important for scaling local reuse. Increased participation in reuse is important for social, economic, and environmental sustainability.

Cette thèse est consacrée à l'étude des législations environnementales et leurs effets sur la chaîne d'approvisionnement. Plus précisément, nous nous intéressons à la législation basée sur le recyclage du produit mais aussi sur les normes de conformité (ROHS). Nous étudions le potentiel de réutilisation ainsi que les aspects environnementaux et économiques de différents systèmes de législation. La solution se présente sous forme d'une combinaison de politiques de récupération qui mène à de meilleurs résultats sur le plan écologique ainsi que sur le plan économique.Dans la deuxième partie de la thèse, Nous étudions la performance comparative des régimes à base sur la législation de récupération avec des problématiques d'innovation et de conception de produits. La politique de réutilisation des produits peut aggraver l’environnement si le cadre de la régulation n'est pas bien défini. Dans la dernière partie, une étude est menée sur le choix des produits dans une chaine d’approvisionnement avec des législations basées sur la récupération et sur la conformité des produits. Nous intégrons les effets de l'incertitude associée à la demande du marché et les paramètres de coût de récupération. Une méthode d'optimisation robuste pour la sélection et distribution des produits est présentée. / Climate change and global temperature rise has made environmental legislations a focal point of discussion. This dissertation is devoted to the study of environmental legislations and their effect on supply chain practices. More precisely, our center of interest is the product recovery based legislation along with compliance based regulations. We explore the reuse potential and the environmental and economical aspects of different product recovery based legislation schemes by modeling a stackelberg game between a social welfare maximizing policy maker and a profit maximizing monopolistic firm and find that a combination of existing recovery policies i.e., a recovery target in combination with incentive structure such as taxation/subsidy may lead to better outcomesnot only from environmental perspective but also from economical aspects. In Chapter 2, we extend the discussion comparative performance of the recovery legislation based schemes in presence of innovation and product design issues and show how unintended environmental outcomes may appear if the policy framework is not adequately designed. In Chapter 3, wecapture the effect of recovery legislation and compliance based legislation on product selection when a firm serves a number of markets. We incorporate the effects of uncertainty associated with market demands and recovery cost parameters and present a robust optimization based method for product selection and allocation decisions.