Designing an integrated municipal solid waste management network: A case study

With increasing population, urbanization and economic development, especially in developing countries, waste generation is increasing sharply. Traditional waste disposal methods bring many problems, such as air pollution, groundwater contamination, soil contamination and greenhouse gas emissions, and endanger the infrastructure of communities. The optimal waste management reduces waste production, social and environmental problems associated with waste and increases energy production and useful materials. In this paper, a multi-objective mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model with the aim of optimizing total costs and risk objectives is developed for designing a municipal solid waste management (MSWM) network. The economic and environmental aspects are considered in the proposed model. To verify and validate the proposed model, a real case study in Qazvin province of Iran is conducted. To solve the multi-objective model, the ε-constraint method is utilized. The obtained results illustrate that the proposed model is able to design the integrated MSWM network trading off between total costs and risk attitude according to decision maker preferences.