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management in extant nationwide garbage disposal sites by introducing a selective
waste collection strategy and optimizing logistics systems.
Increasing environmental concerns, legislative and public pressures have led to
the evaluation of the perspectives of other treatment processes and technologies.
However, technical and economic approaches towards designing solid waste
management systems should not be considered as the only possible solution. While
some research is dedicated to the physical management of municipal solid waste,
relatively little attention has been paid to the larger context necessary for sustain-
able waste treatment. Integrated municipal solid waste management can be de
ned
as the selection and application of suitable techniques, technologies and manage-
ment programs to achieve waste management objectives and goals (Tanskanen
2000
). Sustainable waste management provides a comprehensive inter-disciplinary
framework for addressing the problems of managing municipal solid waste (Kurian
2006
).
Systems with source control can avoid many problems of the processing tech-
nology by respecting different qualities and quantities of the waste streams, by
treating them appropriately for reuse and recycling. Sustainable waste management
means less reliance on land
ll and greater amounts of recycling and composting
(Demirbas
2011
; Graymore et al.
2008
). The purpose of this paper is to describe
and model the sustainability elements of IWMS on regional level.
This chapter is structured as follows. Section
2
describes the history and
background of sustainable waste management and introduces the driving factors of
the IWMS. Section
3
presents the methodological approach of the simulations by
two computational intelligence tools: fuzzy cognitive map (FCM) and bacterial
evolutionary algorithm (BEA). Section
4
presents the results of the simulations.
Finally, a summary is given in Sect.
5
which concludes in answering the question
about the ranking of sustainability factors in waste management.
2 History and Background
The IWMS has to be an economically affordable, environmentally effective and
socially acceptable system. Among others, it includes the practical aspects of waste
management (i.e. transport, treatment and disposal) and the attitudes of citizens
(how they feel about source separation, recycling, incineration, etc.). The evolution
of waste management from truck and dump, to the highly integrated systems
requires an investment of both time and resources (Wilson et al.
2001
).
2.1 The History of Waste Management
Numerous studies introduce the history of waste management. According to
Shmeleva and Powell (
2006
), until the 1960s municipal waste management was
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