Selection of the optimal medical waste incineration facility location: A challenge of medical waste risk management

Background/Aim. Among the other challenges of the 21st century, medical waste has become an arising problem for both the environment and people because of its increasing amount, variety, and complexity. With this, medical waste management started to present a highly important environmental issue. Serbia with no potential for appropriate disposal of all medical waste is forced to export medical waste to countries with medical waste incineration facilities. The reason lies in the fact that the incinerator facility represents an adequate way and a priority in handling medical waste in its end-of-life phase. It must be noted that incineration lowers the possible risks of inappropriate disposal and the emission of environmental pollutants, which leads to the need for a “clever” choice of the incinerator facility location which needs to meet diverse environmental, economic and technical criteria to manage successful processing of medical waste. Methods. In the paper, we applied the criteria for the choice of optimal locations for a medical waste incinerator facility as follows: the amount of waste that needs to be transported, the transport time from other locations, the current pollution of the location, the unemployment rate and the location safety in terms of natural disasters and accidents. By using the obtained results for seven efficient locations gained by Data Envelopment Analysis, we used a goal programming for the analysis of the most suitable location for a medical waste incineration facility. Results. After applying the proposed methodology on the chosen scenario and analysing the criteria relevant for selecting the most suitable location, optimal location is determined for a medical waste incineration facility. Conclusion. Based on the obtained results, we demonstrated that it is possible to develop a methodology that can used goal programming in optimal location selection for a medical waste incineration facility in risk and medical waste management.