Management
of municipal solid waste (MSW) involves multiple stakeholders
such as government agencies, suppliers, consumers, providers of treatment/recycle
services, and transporters. An optimal management strategy should
be based on creating synergistic opportunities that benefit the multiple
participants. This paper presents a multi-objective optimization approach
for the strategic planning of a municipal solid waste management system.
The formulation considers the involved tasks such as recycle, reuse,
transportation, separation, and distribution. The proposed approach
also accounts for the multiple stakeholders with the objective of
maximizing the benefit to all the participating stakeholders. The
Latin Hypercube sampling technique is adopted to systematically generate
weights for the different stakeholders. A case study from Mexico is
analyzed where three scenarios are considered. The first one considers
that the separation cost is absorbed by each recycling company. The
second one assumes that the government is responsible for the separation
cost. The third one requires household inhabitants to carry out waste
sorting. The optimization approach is used to analyze the results
of the various scenarios and to deduce valuable insights on the interaction
among the various stakeholders and the building blocks of the supply
chain of MSW management systems.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.