No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

The present work aims to support tactical and operational planning decisions of reverse logistics systems while considering economic, environmental and social objectives. In the literature, when addressing such systems economic aspects have been often used, while environmental concerns have emerged only recently. The social component is the one less studied and rarely the combination of the three concerns has been analyzed. This work considers the three objectives and was motivated by the challenge of supporting decision makers when managing a real case study of a recyclable waste collection system, where strategic decisions on the number and location of depots, vehicles and containers were taken beforehand. Tactical and operational decisions are studied involving the establishment of service areas for each depot and the definition and scheduling of collection routes for each vehicle. Such decisions should represent a compromise solution between the three objectives translating a sustainable reverse logistics plan. The problem is modeled as a multi-objective, multi-depot periodic vehicle routing problem with inter-depot routes. A mathematical formulation and a solution approach are proposed. An approximation to the Pareto front is obtained for the case study and the trade-offs between the objectives are discussed. A balanced solution is proposed.

No abstract

No abstract

Waste collection is one of the most relevant parts of the integrated solid waste management system in technical, economic, environmental, and social terms. However, the vital role of waste collection has not been recognized, and the support given by the quadruple helixacademics, industry, state, and citizensis reduced when looking for the other operational units of an integrated solid waste management system. To exemplify the missing interest of academia for waste collection, in a Google Scholar search, the results for "waste collection" are about 157,000, for incineration are 375,000, and for landfill are 639,000. This example shows that collection is seen only as the way to make waste to get into high-tech infrastructures, like incineration plants, where real science is applied. The practitioners of the waste collection are the range of workers with lower income backgrounds, making waste collection not attractive enough to be devoted to high-tech solutions for waste collection problems. Many times, waste managers working in waste collection systems are more focused on the trucks and containers and the costs involved in the collection process, which is a considerable amount of local authorities' budget.In a meeting in 2014 between academia and waste collection sectors at the Nova University of Lisbon, waste collection professionals expressed the need for technical skills and knowledge based on waste collection and management practice, in a bottom-up approach. Technical skill areas include cost-efficiency, recycling behavior, environmental impacts, and technical operation. Waste collection professionals all over the world have the same necessities when implementing and managing a waste collection system to know more about the subject, but in such a way that knowledge could be affordable in technical and economic terms.The waste collection professionals' call to fulfill the technical background needs required experts in several fields of waste collection and management. This book results from the collaboration from different science areas and experiences in waste collection and management. Dr. Ana Pires, from whom the original idea was formed, has a scientific role in analyzing solid waste management from a system analysis perspective, where the application of life cycle assessment and multi-criteria decision-making are the techniques applied by her to make waste collection and

No abstract