Optimization models for solid waste management in Indian cities: A study

Abstract

India is a developing country. India’s population is over 1.27 billion people (2014) which are approximated as one-sixth of the world’s population. Such population growth may leave behind the world’s most heavily populated nation China by 2025 (US Census Bureau 2011). Solid waste management is an important environmental issue of all developed and developing countries. The growth of solid waste is basically due to population explosion, urbanization, and mismanagement of municipal corporation. Limitations of Indian Municipality Corporation are waste gathering inefficiency, lack of financial funds, poor planning, and lack of technical knowledge on changing complication of waste materials. In this paper, few important optimization models/techniques proposed by different researchers are studied that may be beneficial for ongoing project work in Municipal solid waste management (MSWM) in different metropolitan cities at various states in India. Much work has not been done in this direction. On the basis of extensive study of literature, it is suggested that the Indian municipal corporation must adopt 4R principles involving reduce, reuse, recycle, and recover to minimize solid waste.