Improving the recyclable waste collection routing in a developing country: a sustainable approach

Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) is considered one of the major factors that impact climate change, and its management represents an important role in the sustainability of cities. In this sense, the optimization of routes for solid waste collection is the main component to reduce the cost of municipal waste management, due to the labor intensity and the massive use of trucks in the collection process. In the literature, multiple studies have been proposed using economic and environmental components in routing models using mathematical programs and solution algorithms. However, the social component of sustainability is the least studied in routing problems; there is scarce evidence of models that explicitly include the social dimension of sustainability in their mathematical formulation. Social aspects have been indirectly addressed through constraints or the impact of objective functions. In contrast with developed countries, the solid waste collection process in emerging economies such as Latin America requires labor intensity of work, and the informal sector plays an important role. Therefore, a sustainable routing process for waste collection represents a significant challenge for developing countries. This research aims to improve collection efficiency, obtain better profits, reduce environmental impact, enhance social aspects with integration of the informal sector in the process in formalizing its routing operations, and the interaction with the formal sector by considering the needs, interests and requirements of stakeholders and legislation associated with waste recycling. A novel mathematical sustainable routing model and a solution approach for solid waste collection will be proposed and validated on test instances and a case study of a developing country.