An Optimal Planning for the Reuse of Municipal Solid Waste Considering Economic, Environmental and Safety Objectives
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Nowadays, the waste generation is a serious problem mainly in the countries with inefficient waste management systems. However, some waste can be reused as raw material for several products using a set of available technologies. In this context, several options to attack this problem have been implemented, but just a few alternatives consider the waste management as an integral part in the supply chain. This way, several technical, environmental and economic aspects have been taken into account for the assessment of the entire supply chain; although, the incorporation of safety criteria into the assessment of the supply chain focused in municipal solid waste have not been implemented in previous papers. Therefore, in this paper is proposed a mathematical programming model for the optimal planning of the reuse of municipal waste to maximize the economic benefits considering sustainability and safety criteria simultaneously. This methodology considers several phases: the separation of waste, distribution of waste to processing facilities, processing of waste to obtain useful products and distribution of products to consumers. Additionally, the safety criteria are based on the fatalities associated with the supply chain for the waste management. The problem is formulated as a multi-objective problem that considers three different objectives: the net annual profit, the amount of reused waste and the total fatalities generated with the considered risks. Results show that it is possible to implement a distributed processing system to reuse municipal waste in an economically attractive way. In addition, results can be used for governments to take decisions about the waste disposal and define the amount of waste that must be reused to obtain several products. It should be noted that results include the supply chain configuration. In addition, in future works this methodology can be extended to problems focused in supply chain design and retrofit simultaneously. 2014 Elsevier B.V.
