Our agent-based model studies emerging markets from a population of producer-sellers and consumers. Sellers exhibit a tolerance d for profitability failures that corresponds to d consecutive time steps of failure. After such d time steps, they randomly choose a new strategy changing their prices and/or their raw material (extracted or recycled more or less available depending on a recycling rate). A seller should propose a good price and have enough raw material to make a deal satisfying the consumer’s budget. Sellers’ activity is profitable for a sufficient number of deals. Our model has two different regimes: one mainly driven by d when the parameter \(\mu \) ruling the profitability threshold is low; a second one mainly driven by \(\mu \) . These regimes define prices and thus the number of satisfied sellers and consumers. Parameters have strong macro impacts and recycling is successful only when sellers sufficiently change their strategy.