abstract
- © 2017 American Chemical Society.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.