Improving efficiency of Municipal waste collection: the case of Kragujevac

Abstract

Collection and transportation within the system of solid waste management may account more than 60% of the overall budget, most of which is for fuel costs. Furthermore, municipal vehicles have great environmental impact through exhaust gases emissions. The aim of this research was to estimate the potential for reduction of fuel consumption and thus the emission of CO2 through the communal vehicles route optimization. Innovative model for municipal solid waste collection and transportation is proposed. This model is part of an extended solid waste management system and uses a spatial Geodatabase, integrated in a GIS environment. All the paths of communal vehicles within one sector (collecting zone) of City of Kragujevac were analyzed and optimized, by using commercial software, according to criteria of shortest distance. Optimized routes indicate to great fuel savings compared to the origin one. In addition, street classification was made and each street segment was attributed with average fuel consumption. In order to evaluate fuel consumption factor the method proposed in COPERT software was used. Thus, the most economical route was extracted and also compared to the origin one and the optimized route concerning shortest distance.