A planning model for the development of waste material recycling programmes

Material recycling is quickly becoming the most visible component of municipal solid waste management systems, and optimization models could play a prominent role in the long-term cost-effective planning of these systems. This paper develops a mixed integer programming model for the recycling of various by-product materials within the overall waste system. This model is solvable on a microcomputer for reasonable problem dimensions, and the planning methodology is applied to a hypothetical municipality to illustrate the potential utility of the developed modelling approach.