Optimal Location of Transfer Stations for Waste Management: a Real Case Study

Waste management is a major challenge for local governments in both urban and rural areas. Even if advances were made in improving collection efficiency, local administrations and waste collection service providers still need useful tools for supporting them in collection management, especially referred to waste facility location. In this context, this paper proposes a model for the optimal location of transfer stations within municipal solid waste management. In particular, we formulate a binary optimisation model for solving the problem and apply it to several real case studies, related to the district sub-areas (DSAs) of the Province of Caserta. Two approaches were proposed: one aimed at optimising costs and the other at optimising CO2 emissions. The results obtained showed the feasibility of the proposed approach, also about the application to a real case.