The model captures product supply, demand, transportation and transformation conducted by a collection of stakeholders in the value chain, including waste providers, waste transporters, waste processors, and end-product consumers. We assign notation to the properties of the above four stakeholder classes of the value chain as follows. County waste providers (residents) are collectively indexed in the set i ∈ G each with a supplying cost α g i ∈ R + , maximum supplying capacity g i ∈ R + , and the amount of plastic supplied, also referred to plastic supply flow g i ∈ R + . The upcycling facility network is represented as a set of technology providers m ∈ M with processing costs α ξ m ∈ R + (which include contributions from annualized capital costs), processing capacity ξ m ∈ R + , and the amount of product processed ξ m ∈ R + . We model the value chain for upcycling end products as consumers present every county node (indexed as j ∈ D) with arbitrarily high capacities (d j ∈ R + ), uniform product demanding price (α d j ∈ R + ), and the amount of product demanded, referred to as demand flow (d j ∈ R + ). Finally, the transporters of recyclables, plastic wastes, and other upcycling intermediates are indexed by the set l ∈ L, with transportation cost α f l ∈ R + , capacities f l ∈ R + , and the amount of product moved f l ∈ R + . We use subsets to simplify the notation for transport: L in n,p is the subset of transport providers l ∈ L who deliver product p to node n, and similarly L out n,p are those who transport p away from n. We use a similar notation for product transformation with the set M gen n,p used to represent those technologies producing a product p at node n and M con n,p those technologies consuming it. The parameters γ m,p are the input and output yield coefficients for each technology (e.g., the mass of LDPE that can be produced from a given basis of polyethylene monomers).