Large-scale disaster waste management under uncertain environment

Abstract

The phenomena of global warming have increased the frequency of natural disasters. These disasters generate thousands of tons of waste and cause loss of human lives, environmental damages, and economic losses every year. Currently, disaster response policies are reactive in nature to bring the community back to normal routine. However, increased resilience against future disasters can be achieved by working on long-term planning and setting goals for ecological, economic, and social sustainability in disaster response policies. Keeping in view the importance of the considered issue, this study proposes a large-scale disaster waste management supply chain model, considering economic aspect via total waste processing, environmental aspect by greenhouse gas emissions from disaster waste processing, and social aspect by job opportunities generated during waste processing. To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed supply chain model, numerical experiments are performed on a large-scale case problem. Results show that there is a strong trade-off among the dimensions of sustainability. If decision makers want to achieve higher satisfaction levels against environmental and social objectives, the operational cost of waste management will increase accordingly. Numerical studies obtain the results in accordance with the values of the confidence level of decision makers and coefficient of compensation decided by the managers which also provides the flexibility for the decision makers of developing countries to obtain preferred compromised solution in accordance with their own preferences for the dimensions of sustainability during disaster waste management operation.