11. Regional Waste Management: Multicriteria Modelling

This chapter is devoted to sustainable waste management. It summarises some recent work exploring the development of a multi-criteria optimisation tool for achieving sustainable solutions for municipal solid waste management systems (MSWMS). Aiming to provide a new methodological background for regional solid waste management modelling it takes into account spatial and temporal patterns of waste generation and processing, environmental as well as economic impacts of the system’s development with a particular emphasis on public health and biodiversity.

Three different approaches to the spatial-temporal analysis of the MSWMS are used together, namely a life cycle inventory analysis, which helps to identify emission patterns within the MSWMS, a multi-criteria optimisation approach, which helps to find compromise solutions among environmentally and economically preferred options, and a geographic information systems approach, which provides a tool for identifying waste management facilities, transportation environmental and social impacts; it also gives an analysis of environmental impacts on valuable ecosystems. A Russian methodology for calculating environmental damage was used to weight the importance of different sub-territories covered by the system as well as simplifying the analysis of emissions from waste treatment plants. The approach provides a new perspective for the analysis of municipal solid waste management systems on the regional scale. The principal novelty of the proposed complex MSW strategic management model is an integration of the different types of data: geographical, environmental and economic, using relational database technology.

Simulations using the dataset for Gloucestershire illustrate the performance of a simplified version of the model. Simulations were undertaken to explore the potential effects on the waste management infrastructure of introducing the EU Landfill Directive. The chapter shows how methodological synthesis and a systems perspective give useful support to the decision-maker regarding potential development paths and trade-offs between the economic and environmental performance of a proposed waste management system.