Modeling and identification of suitable motivational mechanism in the collection system of municipal solid waste supply chain

Towards a sustainable organic waste supply chain: A comparison of centralized and decentralized systems

Proper disposal of Municipal Solid (MSW) waste is an important issue as it causes land, air, and water pollution. Organic MSW provides a habitat environment to insects and often it spreads dangerous diseases. Major reasons identified behind this as the non-separation of MSW at the source and lack of facilities (bins) in the appropriate place for collection of wastes. The present study has proposed an integrated three-stage model to provide a solution to the problem of (i) allocation of the bin for waste collection, (ii) allocation and comparison of centralized and decentralized composting plants, and finally, (iii) vehicle routing for waste collection. The proposed generic model is applied to an Indian city, Bilaspur located in the state of Chhattisgarh. From the results, it is observed that the first stage model provides an optimal number of bins required and allocation of it at minimum cost. Taking it as input for the second stage model, it identifies the best locations for centralized and decentralized composting plants. The result also reveals that decentralized composting plants are more economical than centralized plants. Finally, the third stage of the model identifies the vehicle routing for the waste collection considering both centralized and decentralized plants to minimize the cost. Further, sensitivity analysis is carried out on collection rate and participation percentage parameters to draw additional insights for better management of MSW.

Dump or recycle? Consumer's environmental awareness and express package disposal based on an evolutionary game model

Along with the rapid development of the express industry and the inevitable trend of sustainable development, the disposal of express packaging is an urgent problem that needs to be solved. With the objective to the effective disposal mode for express packaging, this paper introduces the consumers' environmental awareness into the framework and establishes an evolutionary game model to explore the governing measures of the express packaging recycling industry. It is found that without considering consumers' environmental awareness, the government's reward and punishment mechanism alone cannot restrain the recycler's decision-making effectively, while the participation of the consumers with environmental awareness could drive the strategy of the recycler to converge to the ideal state effectively, which is recycling the express packaging actively. The sensitivity analysis shows that the participation of consumers with environmental awareness significantly weakens the recycling difficulty and reduces the recycling cost of the recycler, which is helpful to improve the willingness of the recycler to recycle the express packaging continually. Thereby, the express packaging recycling industry can be improved better when the consumer's awareness of environmental protection is enhanced.