An Agent-Based Modeling Approach for Informing the U.S. Plastic Waste Management Process Yuanhui Huang Computer and Information Technology Purdue University West Lafayette, USA Email: huan1275@purdue.edu Aasakiran Madamanchi Computer and Information Technology Purdue University West Lafayette, USA Email: amadaman@umich.edu Tugba Karabiyik Purdue Systems Collaboratory Purdue University West Lafayette, USA Email: tugba@purdue.edu Alejandra J. Magana Computer and Information Technology Purdue University West Lafayette, USA Email: admagana@purdue.edu Abstract— Recycling is one of the most significant issues in the waste management system. As the use and demand for plastics increase every year, finding efficient and environment-friendly solutions to handle the plastics in the plastic waste management system gets more challenging. There are economic, environmental, and educational factors affecting plastic waste management. This paper investigates the effects of educational campaigns and system-wide improvement. For this, we used an Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation approach in the NetLogo environment. We provided various scenarios in the current plastics waste life cycle using a real dataset to validate our model, which was from the American Chemistry Council and the National Association for PET Container Resources from 2018. We found that education, technology, and infrastructure changes should be considered holistically to overcome this problem at a system level. Keywords-Agent-Based Modeling; NetLogo; Recycling; Plastic Waste Management I. INTRODUCTION The demand for plastics increases every year, and over 300 million tons of plastics were produced in 2018. All of these plastics meet one of three fates within the plastic waste system: (1) recycling and reproduction, (2) thermal destruction (combustion with energy recovery), and (3) landfill deposition. Recent estimates of the fates of all plastics ever made indicate that only 9% was recycled, 12% was incinerated, and 79% was deposited in landfills or discarded in natural environments, such as the oceans [1][2]. The plastics recycling process faces three significant challenges. First, dealing with plastic waste is hugely expensive. Simply removing plastic litter from the United States’ west coast costs taxpayers $520 million each year [3]. Effective regeneration techniques are still lacking in current plastic management systems. While the plastics generation increases every year, it leads to an imbalance between input and output. Secondly, combustion and discarding have severe negative impacts on the environment. The degrading process is slow, and toxic greenhouse gases are produced. Plastics waste breaking into smaller pieces, known as microplastics, can adhere to waterborne organic pollutants and infiltrate food webs [4]. Thirdly, due to the outbreak of COVID-19, the consumption and demand for plastics have increased sharply [5]. One hundred twenty-nine billion face masks and 65 billion gloves are used with a monthly estimate [6]. The increasing demand and use of plastics cause significant problems in the plastic waste management system [2]. Many recycling facilities’ safety-related suspensions further exacerbate this trend. Without proper public waste management, there is a risk of widespread environmental contamination [6]. The current plastic waste management system needs better approaches to deal with these large numbers of post-consumer plastics. However, it remains unclear what interventions will best support plastic waste management. This paper presents an agent-based model that simulates the plastics waste management lifecycle at multiple scales. Agent-based modeling is a simulation technique that can be used to analyze complex social systems. It is a computational approach that agents with specific variables, behaviors, and characteristics interact with each other [7]. This modeling and simulation provide a direct and visual approach to modeling different scenarios in the current plastics waste lifecycle. Our research question for this study is the following: R.Q.: How do strategies, such as an education campaign and a system-wide improvement, influence the behavior of plastics waste management? The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 reviews related background in plastics waste management. Section 3 outlines the research methodology. The research results and recommendations are shown in section 4, followed by a conclusion in Section 5. 65 Copyright (c) IARIA, 2021. ISBN: 978-1-61208-898-3 SIMUL 2021 : The Thirteenth International Conference on Advances in System Simulation