A sustainable municipal solid waste system design considering public awareness and education: A case study

The municipal solid waste management (MSWM) system design considered here is effective in reducing supply chain costs and environmental risks. One of the practical approaches that governments use to encourage MSWM practices is educating households with regard to reducing waste generation and increasing recycling and composting rates. This research aims to utilize a new multi-objective stochastic optimization model to design a MSWM system, taking public awareness and educating the public into consideration. Further, the efficiency induced by educating the public is also taken into account using its corresponding factors in the model. In this article, two types of truck for collecting the mixed and separated waste are appraised. Due to the unpredictability of some of the parameters of the MSWM models, allowances are made for uncertainty. The proposed model is applied to a real case in Tehran, Iran. To show the impact of educating households, the model is compared with a similar model that does not take educating the public into account. The results show a reduction of 40% in the total cost and an increment of 17% in the social impact as opposed to the model that does not take educating the public into consideration. This acknowledges that educating the public will improve the results obtained.