A multi-objective sustainable planning for a real hazardous waste production problem

TL;DR

This paper develops a multi-objective MINLP model for sustainable hazardous waste management, optimizing costs, risks, and emissions, and demonstrates its effectiveness through a real-world case study.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multi-objective model that integrates sustainability considerations into hazardous waste location-routing problems.

Findings

Sustainability reduces total costs, risks, and CO2 emissions.

The model provides managerial insights for better decision-making.

Inclusion of sustainability improves environmental and economic outcomes.

Abstract

A significant amount of hazardous waste generated from health sectors and industrial processes has posed a major threat to human health by causing environmental issues and contamination of air, soil, and water resources. This paper presents a multi-objective mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) formulation for a sustainable hazardous waste location-routing problem. The location of the facilities and routing decisions for transporting hazardous waste and the waste residue is considered to design a suitable waste collection system. The presented model simultaneously minimizes the total costs of the waste management system, total risks from transportation and facilities, along with CO2 emissions. A real-world case study is presented to illustrate the applicability of the proposed model. To illustrate the significance of sustainability, the results of the original model are compared with the results of the model without considering sustainability. It indicates that, under the condition when sustainability is not taken into account, total cost, transportation, and site risk along with CO2 emission increased, which in turn demonstrated the importance of sustainability. Furthermore, the managerial insights gained from the optimal results would enable the managers to make better decisions in the hazardous waste management system.