Optimal locations of landfills and transfer stations in solid waste management

Abstract

In the recent years solid waste management has been given an increasing importance due to health factors and environmental concerns. Solid waste management refers to a complex task that covers the collection, transfer, treatment, recycling, resource recovery, and disposal of waste. In this thesis, we investigate the siting aspect of solid waste management for the siting of landfills and transfer stations. We first review the context of solid waste management and clarify the elements associated with it. We review the actual siting process applied by the authorities and compare it with the methods proposed by the researchers. We aim to examine how good the models used in optimization may be at approximating the actual siting process. For that purpose we formulate p-median models for several countries and compare the exisiting landfill locations with the cost-based optimal solutions. Another issue that we concentrate on is the siting of the transfer stations. We propose a new mixed integer programming model for the siting of the transfer stations and apply the proposed method for the city of Ankara.