Evaluate municipal solid waste management problems using hierarchical framework

Evaluation of municipal solid waste management (MSWM) is a challenging issue because it involves complex, interrelated criteria and thus calls for proper modeling approaches to clearly identify the crucial criteria and their interrelationships to initiate more effective strategies for improving MSWM activities. This paper aims to develop a hierarchical evaluation framework for the MSWM problems with the interpretive structural modeling (ISM) technique. The proposed hierarchical framework include four main steps: identifying the interrelationships among criteria, establishing the reachability matrix, determining the hierarchical levels of criteria, and developing the four-quadrant map. An empirical study on Taipei metropolitan area is undertaken, in which 18 MSWM criteria under 4 aspects (human development, natural resources and eco-system, economic, and social) are proposed. Our results show that the proposed criteria can be successfully constructed into a visual map via the driving and dependence power analysis (DDPA). Some implications are addressed.