Road map towards future planning for waste management in circular cities: Decision making strategies and complementary tools

Abstract

Increasing population and urbanization are leading to increase in industrial activities and they all have direct correlation with waste generation. Traditional waste management applications, which are landfilling and incineration, have become inefficient due to increase in waste amount, their adverse environmental impacts and resource depletion. Nowadays, new understandings about limited natural sources and global environmental problems such as climate change lead to shifts in waste management strategies. Policy makers brought the concept of Circular Economy (CE) in front and take significant actions to promote waste management in the direction of reduction, reuse, recycling, recovery, and usage of environmentally friendly materials. The fundamental principle of CE is to prevent the loss of materials and natural sources by closing the loop in production and waste management activities and minimize the disposal of sources as waste. Since waste management is usually applied at municipality level, implementation of CE principles is expected to be at city level and new cities which are shifted from linear economy to CE are called as Circular City. Transition from linear cities to circular cities requires significant changes and revisions in various areas including the prediction of waste amount and type for planning, re-design of infrastructure for waste separation & collection, developing new policies for waste management strategies, designing and operation of new material recovery facilities. Therefore, circular cities need developing roadmaps towards future planning for waste management. Usage of various decision-making methodologies and complementary tools is urgent hence, developing roadmap for new waste management strategies is complicated because of the presence of several factors influencing the decision. For this purpose, waste management studies have been using decision making methodologies and complementary tools intensely since a few years when international organizations are clearly announced action plans for the transition to circular cities. This chapter aims to review the waste management studies that have been published lately and contribute to development of roadmaps for the transition to circular cities. To be more conclusive, reviewed studies are limited to include the most commonly used decision-making methodologies and complementary tools. In this context, the studies using Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) methods and the complementary tools including Material Flow Analysis (MFA), System- Dynamic Based Approach (SD), Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Life Cycle Costing (LCC) and Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA) are selected. The studies reviewed in this chapter demonstrated that these tools have potential to contribute to roadmap planning of waste management strategies for circular cities. © 2022 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.