Legislation-induced planning of waste processing infrastructure: A case study of the Czech Republic

journal article in Web of Science

en

Trends in the treatment of municipal solid waste are changing worldwide. In the European Union, one of the largest economies in the world, the waste treatment and management among the member states vary significantly. To support and promote environmentally friendly waste management, the European Union issued directives commonly called the Circular Economy Package. This legislative is designed to accelerate the transition to a cleaner future. It gives an obligation to member states to meet specific landfilling and recycling targets. To reach these ambitious goals will be a challenging task, especially for the member states with less developed waste management systems. An approach using multi-stage stochastic programming is suggested for solving such a problem. The developed model considers current material recovery rates and trends in municipal waste, while uncertain waste production is forecasted by possible scenarios. The model enables sequential decision-making and assessment of various strategies for different future scenarios with specific years, locations, technologies and capacities for the establishment of the waste processing infrastructure. The utilization of the model and its computational tractability is demonstrated in a case study of the Czech Republic.

Trends in the treatment of municipal solid waste are changing worldwide. In the European Union, one of the largest economies in the world, the waste treatment and management among the member states vary significantly. To support and promote environmentally friendly waste management, the European Union issued directives commonly called the Circular Economy Package. This legislative is designed to accelerate the transition to a cleaner future. It gives an obligation to member states to meet specific landfilling and recycling targets. To reach these ambitious goals will be a challenging task, especially for the member states with less developed waste management systems. An approach using multi-stage stochastic programming is suggested for solving such a problem. The developed model considers current material recovery rates and trends in municipal waste, while uncertain waste production is forecasted by possible scenarios. The model enables sequential decision-making and assessment of various strategies for different future scenarios with specific years, locations, technologies and capacities for the establishment of the waste processing infrastructure. The utilization of the model and its computational tractability is demonstrated in a case study of the Czech Republic.

Waste management planning; Circular economy; Multi-stage optimization; Sustainable processing infrastructure; Renewable energy; Waste-to-energy

30.07.2020

1364-0321

132

Oct 2020

1–14

14