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Table 1
' Key drivers ' of IWMS and their respective subsystems
Factors
Subsystem elements
Environmental factors
Emissions; climate change; land use; recovery and recycling targets;
depletion of natural resources; human toxicity
Economic factors
Ef ciency at subsystem level; ef ciency at system level; available
funding/subsidies; equity; system costs and revenues; pricing system
for waste services, secondary materials market
Social factors
Public opinion; public participation in the decision making process;
risk perception; employment; local demographics
population den-
sity, household size and household income; public resistance
(NIMBY
not in my backyard, LULU
locally unacceptable land
use)
Institutional factors
Local and regional politics and planning; managerial conditions and
future directions; institutional and administrative structure of waste
management
Legal factors
Relevant legislation (international, national, regional and municipal)
Technical factors
Collection and transfer system; treatment technologies; waste stream
composition and change
We have accepted this approach as well-founded; however, some of the results
of our present research motivate us to re-validate the inputs by the stakeholders in a
later phase of the investigation.
As a result of the incompleteness and multiple uncertainties occurring in sus-
tainable waste management systems, we propose the use of FCM to support the
planning and decision making process. It is obvious that uncertainties involved with
waste management represent vagueness rather than probability. Fuzzy sets and
fuzzy logic are suitable to construct a formal description and a mathematically
manageable model of systems and processes with such uncertainties. By observa-
tion of the model and its time dependent behaviour we determined under what
conditions the long-term sustainability of a regional waste management system
could be ensured. In this paper, we introduce a model of waste management which
investigates the six most common factors
environmental, economic, social,
technical, legal and institutional aspects. The next section introduces the approach
applied for the modelling.
3 The Methodological Approach
In the development of the FCM, in the
first step of the design process the number
and features of constituting factors were determined by the relevant literature, as it
was mentioned beforehand. These six concepts are supposed to be combined all
together in a single system, with mutual interactions.
Modern technological systems are complex and they are usually comprised of a
large number of interacting and coupling entities that are called subsystems and/or
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