QUANTITATIVE EVALUATION OF ALTERNATIVES FOR MUNICIPAL SOLID WASTE TREATMENT IN BULGARIA

The present practice for treatment of municipal solid wastes in Bulgaria is to collect them in landfills. This leads to a serious ecological problem related to the emission of landfill gas which is extremely harmful for the environment (causing global warming). In this paper, four alternative policies for municipal waste treatment are defined (landfill without utilization of the landfill gas, landfill with producing synthetical gas from the landfill gas, landfill with producing electricity from the landfill gas and waste incineration with production of electricity). Four criteria to evaluate these alternatives are formulated. Selection of the best alternative is represented as a multi-criteria optimization problem and a strategy to solve this problem is developed.