Future Assessment of Municipal Solid Waste Management Strategy for Taichung Special Municipality in Taiwan

摘要

Efficient treatment of municipal solid waste (MSW) is an important subject for urban planning. Recently, the incineration has become the major MSW treatment policy in Taiwan. However, due to the high material recovery rate, the incinerators faced problems that there is not enough MSW available for treatment. For Taichung City and Taichung County, the total daily generation of MSW is 1,483 ton/day which is less than the total treatment capacity of 2,220 ton/day of the existing three incinerators. Therefore, the incinerators turn to incinerate general industrial wastes in order to operate at a suitable condition. Moreover, since there is no regional MSW management program between Taichung City and Taichung County, the economies of scale can be hardly achieved. Owing to the Taichung City and Taichung County are about to merge into a Taichung Special Municipality, it is a good opportunity to develop regionalized MSW treatment strategies for the new metropolitan. This study employed mixed integer linear programming to evaluate the least-cost MSW treatment strategies for Taichung Special Municipality under different scenarios. The total number of 29 districts, 3 incinerators and 16 landfills, associated with the real world operation data, were considered in the optimization models to make the results more practical.