Advanced Design of Separated Household Waste Collection Systems on the Base of GIS Modelling

The Hungarian waste management sector is under transformation now. The new (2012/CLXXXV) Law on the Waste applies requirements on the players of the waste market that will result in the reorganization of the whole waste management industrial sector. The aim of the system transformation is enhancing the proportion of separately treated waste in accordance with the EU directives. Emerging waste quantities to be separately treated means challenge for the existing logistic capacities (e.g., collector vehicles); thus evaluation of their actual efficiency and utilization seems to be useful in the course of the transformation. With this object in view, a new separated waste collection system planning approach and a software module were developed on the base of a geographic information system (GIS) platform. The software module was designed to help choose and localize the appropriate collection methods and define the logistically effective collector vehicle routes according to the settlement structures of urban environments. 1. Introduction Most of the Hungarian towns established their own separated collection systems for valuable secondary raw materials (mainly in the form of kerbside collection islands for PET bottles, packaging paper, and aluminium beverage cans) more than a decade ago. These collection systems were implemented and operated independently from each other by the local public service providers. There are fair differences among these systems regarding the collected quantities as well as regarding the operation costs. Moreover, inequalities regarding the collection performances (measured, e.g., in m3/month) of the kerbside islands are observed and proved by statistics that are made upon the data of accounting reports. These inequalities manifest themselves in many forms. Both the negative impacts of overfilled collection containers on the environmental consciousness of the inhabitants and economic disadvantage of unloading low filled collection containers raise local waste collection service providers’ demands to abolish these inequalities. A local waste collection service provider expresses its development needs to the Environmental Management and Logistics Department of Bay Zoltan Nonprofit Ltd. for Applied Research for R&D expertise contribution. This cooperation results in the new planning approach and the GIS software module. Figure 1 shows the results of the time series of waste quantity data processing which confirms the assumptions regarding the mentioned negative effects. Impacts of several factors which marked to have direct or indirect