Enviro-economic optimization for the design of municipal solid waste management strategies

A significant amount of municipal solid waste (MSW) generation and ineffective management can cause adverse impacts on the environment (air and water pollution) and human health. Therefore, a sustainable approach for handling MSW is required. This study aims to develop a tool to select the most promising MSW management system using the superstructure optimization technique to ensure that the selected system can achieve minimization of the total annual cost and environmental impacts. This can lead to a multi-objective superstructure optimization problem solved by using the augmented $$\epsilon$$ ϵ -constraint method. The developed model is based on the concept of material balance and all potential technologies include anaerobic digestion, pyrolysis, gasification, incineration, sanitary landfill, material recovery facility and composting. The proposed methodology is applied to synthesize the MSW management system in Warin Chamrap district to determine its applicability. In this research, the composition of MSW includes organics, paper, plastic, glass, and others. The results show that the Pareto-optimal solutions optimizing both total annual cost and environmental impacts can be developed. The MSW management system with the lower total annual cost tends to have the higher environmental impacts and the trade-offs between each objective can be identified so the decision-makers are able to consider before making their decision. Further investigation on sensitivity analysis reveals that the selling prices of products, annual capital cost, and operating cost factors have different degree of impacts on the waste management strategies and total annual cost.