A Logistics Model for Post-Consumer Waste Recycling

In this paper, we propose a logistics model for post-consumer packaging waste recycling (Grid City Model). This model can predict the transport distance and the number of trucks needed to collect post-consumer packaging waste for recycling. The parameters needed are population, area, waste discard unit, number of collection stations, size of a collection truck, frequency of collection. Tradeoff relation between the service level of waste collection and environmental load or the number of trucks is explicitly described in the Grid City Model. Both the unit transport distance (D/W) and the number of collection trucks per a unit waste (M/W) are described as a sum of the "density effect" and the "scale effect": the "density effect depends on the effective capacity of the collection truck (q) and independent of the waste discard unit (u) nor the collection, frequency (f); the "scale effect" depends on both u and f and independent of q. Both D/W and M/W of sorted collection of PET bottle is much larger than those of the household wast e in a typ i cal case.