Municipal Solid Waste Management (Free Essay Example)

As time has gone on and urban societies have developed and grown, there has been an increasing demand for municipal solid waste management in accordance with social, economic, and environmental impacts. Further, it calls for the generation, source separation, storage, collection, transport, processing, recovery, and disposal. Additionally, Municipal solid waste management is a contemporary issue in our society which now no longer accepts low-control disposal practices (Rada et al., 2013). This is due to these low-control practices causing harm such as contamination of groundwater, disposing hazards into landfills, and toxic emissions. The lack of decision making, accounting for uncertainties and complexity, needs to change in order to better manage waste.

This has resulted in a call for different strategies to be used in order to optimize municipal solid waste management, and create cost effective, sustainable, and effective systems according to municipalities and their characteristics. It’s important to highlight that these new strategies are quite necessary as collection and transportation costs make up a high percentage of waste management which results in operational problems, and difficulty in integrating waste management systems. The range of costs and difficulties being analyzed differ depending on many of the municipality's characteristics such as population, density, quantity of waste and its characteristics, collection/transportation distances, and more (Jacobsen et al., 2013).

The details as to why collection and transportation play such a significant, and complicated role in this process is mainly due to two reasons which are the intensity of labor, and the mass of vehicle use. Due to the variations in routing issues and time windows based on the type of management being carried out, what type of municipality, and its waste’s characteristics, it may be difficult to balance the number of multiple disposal trips and minimize the number of vehicles and travel time. Additionally, depending on the service, collection and disposal sites may be visited multiple times each day. However, the frequency of these sites being visited may also change depending on the municipality and if there are service related changes. Furthermore, the effect of hauling large containers for certain types of collection introduces more routing issues in regards to picking up and dropping off empty and full containers. The issue arises in the sense that different types of service, container size, vehicle used, requirements, and waste type can change each day. As complexities vary, it’s necessary to implement an optimized waste management strategy for different municipalities to improve their routing, and time issues, with respect to collection and transportation (Kim et al., 2006). 

To add on, while an important goal is to minimize the amount of vehicles and travel time, route compactness should also be considered for the systems we create, as it plays a role from a practical perspective. The reason being is that routes will have a smaller amount of crossovers, which can be done with the use of moving stops among clusters, essentially less overlapping. Moreover, another consideration that plays a relevant role in the systems created involved workload balancing among the vehicles (Kim et al., 2006). These various factors represent the fact that in order to improve the issues related to collection and transportation, the system(s) to be created must include an optimized strategy in which waste collection and transportation route length are reduced.

The goal of this report is to provide a focus on the collection and transportation of solid waste from any generation source whether they be residential, commercial, or industrial, to their respective processing plants or landfill sites. To do so, various factors which affect these processes must be considered, which are the quantity and characteristics of municipal solid waste being generated, the amount of waste collectors and coverages of their respective municipalities, and the vehicles chosen for their respective processing plants and transfer stations. The chosen approach for optimizing the collection and transportation issues will be based upon the traveling salesman problem. It contains pickup and delivery vertices on a graph in which a one-to-one relation is represented. Furthermore, the method revolves around the idea that each pickup is visited before its associated delivery. It is a method that can be used to optimize the routes using a graph to model differing numbers of requests, and deliveries using vertices and edges/paths to ensure that each route visits a municipality once, and returns to its origin at the end. So, the use of the traveling salesman problem allows for municipalities to create optimized collection and transportation routes for solid waste management which are cost effective, efficient, and short in terms of distance and time (Dumitrescu et al., 2009).

In order to successfully manage municipal solid waste, and adjust existing systems according to developments over time, various strategies are to be created in order to optimize the significant portions of the systems in place and to be created. With societal, economical, and environmental factors in mind, optimization allows us to use the traveling salesman problem to formulate and review the collection and transportation routes as well as the varying characteristics involved. As a result, this report will further discuss the reviewal and formulation of the model to be used in different stages, and provide optimal results to enhance current and future planning to collection and transportation route lengths.