Strategic planning of recycling drop-off stations and collection network by multiobjective programming

Effective planning of solid-waste recycling programs is a substantial chall enge to the current solid-waste management systems in Taiwan. Due to the ra pid depletion of landfill space and the continuing delay in construction pr ograms of municipal incinerators, solid-waste management strategies have to be reorganized in light of the success of recycling, recovery, and reuse o f secondary materials. One of these efforts is how to effectively allocate recycling drop-off stations of appropriate size and how to design efficient collection-vehicle routing and scheduling programs in the solid waste coll ection network. This management strategy is particularly important in the p rivatized system with recycling containers and material recovery facilities (MRFs) owned by one agency. This research seeks multiobjective evaluation of the trade-off between the number and size of drop-off stations, the popu lation covered in the service network, the average walking distance to drop off stations by the population, and the distance traveled by collection veh icles. it also illustrates the use of the multiobjective nonlinear mixed in teger programming model to achieve such goals that are solved by the geneti c algorithms (GA) in a geographical information system (GIS) platform. The case study shows the application potential of such a methodology in the cit y of Kaohsiung in Taiwan.