Abstract
Hazardous waste management is of paramount importance due to the potential threats posed to the environment and local residents. The design of a hazardous waste management system involves several important decisions, i.e., the determination of the locations and sizes of treatment, recycling and disposal facilities, and organizing the transportation of hazardous waste among different facilities. In this paper, we proposed a novel stochastic bi-objective mixed integer linear program (MILP) to support these decisions in order to reduce the population exposure to risk while simultaneously maintaining a high cost efficiency of the transportation and treatment of hazardous waste. Moreover, considering the inherent uncertainty within the planning horizon, the cost, demand and affected population are defined as stochastic parameters. A sample average approximation based goal programming (SAA-GP) approach is used to solve the mathematical model. The proposed model and solution method are validated through numerical experiments whose results show that uncertainty may not only affect the objective value but also lead to different strategic decisions in the network design of a hazardous waste management system. In this regard, the strategic decisions obtained by the stochastic model is more robust to the change of external environment. Finally, the model is applied in a real-world case study of healthcare waste management in Wuhan, China, in order to show its applicability.
Highlights
With the rapid increase on production and consumption, a large amount of hazardous waste is generated from a wide range of industries and service sectors (Rabbani et al, 2019), e.g., production and manufacturing, chemical processes, construction, healthcare, and household activities
The statistical lower bound is the mean of the optimal value of 10 repetitions (Mak et al, 1999), and the upper bound is calculated through optimizing the reference sample with one of the feasible first-stage decisions obtained from the Sample average approximation (SAA) problems
The network design of a hazardous waste management system is a complex decision making problem that needs to achieve a trade-off between system operating cost and population exposure risk
Summary
With the rapid increase on production and consumption, a large amount of hazardous waste is generated from a wide range of industries and service sectors (Rabbani et al, 2019), e.g., production and manufacturing, chemical processes, construction, healthcare, and household activities. An inevitable by-product of industrial processes and can be found in several forms, e.g., solid, sludge, liquid, packaged or containerized gases, etc., from both large-scale industrial sectors and small businesses (Alumur and Kara, 2007). Any type of waste can be classified as hazardous if it possesses any of the following properties: ignitability, reactivity, corrosiveness or toxicity (Alumur and Kara, 2007). Because of these characteristics, if hazardous waste is treated or disposed of in an inappropriate manner, the nearby residents and the environment will be exposed to substantial risk and threats. Yu et al / Journal of Cleaner Production 277 (2020) 123566 network decisions are affected by the compatibility between hazardous waste and the adopted technology
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