Delivering Value of Composting and Recycling in Household Waste Management System: An Agent-Based Modeling Approach

Abstract

Community and government have different perspectives and roles in conducting household waste management system. On one hand, the government generates a policy to decrease waste to be sent to final disposal; on the other hand, the community will accept that, and without community involvement, sometimes the policy will not run well. Household waste management system policies focus on delivering value of composting and recycling in community. One of the policies is waste bank which lets the community turn their waste into money in the form of savings like in a bank. Efforts from different household waste supply chain parties such as government and communities must be coordinated. This research aims to find the exact coordination between government and communities in order to adopt household waste policies especially waste bank. This research considers possibilities to produce policies by determining community needs previously (bottom-up technologies). Agent-based modeling presents three kinds of community: the careless community (not willing to adopt waste management technologies/policies even it is profitable for them), arguing community (not willing to adopt waste management technologies/policies when it is not profitable for them), and adapting community (willing to adopt waste management technologies/policies whether it is profitable or not for them). The simulation shows that the number of adapting communities is increasing; meanwhile the number of arguing communities is decreasing. However, the number of careless communities is increasing in the first half of simulation and starts decreasing in the second half of simulation. According to this result, communities socially interact with and influence each other because in the first half, the number of arguing communities was larger than that of adapting communities, which affects the increasing number of careless communities, and then in the second half, the number of adapting communities was larger than that of arguing communities, which influence the decreasing number of careless communities. It also shows that the role of government to maintain policies profitable for community is important.