The economic performance of upcycling is sensitive to various technical specifications and value chain externalities such as waste offering cost for recyclables, transport costs, polymer market val- ues, and investment budgets available to cover capital costs. In the baseline solution represented by Figure , US residential waste producers donate recyclables (offered for free) and capital investment budgets are unconstrained, while transport costs, polymer market values, and technology efficiencies remain unchanged from the analysis of Ma et al. . Here, we compare performance of the upcycling infrastructure with adjustments to these parameters; we measure impact of these parameters in terms of the the percent of total waste captured by the upcycling infrastructure and the total profit of the system (economic surplus).