The objectives of this project are:
- To investigate the existing role of transportation in the recovery and recycling of sustainable municipal, commercial and consumer waste streams.
- To develop theoretical models that evaluate the effectiveness of alternate material collection methods/schemes in improving recovery rates while reducing transportation costs.
Air
As a result of growing public concern and increased legislation, more emphasis is being placed on the end-of-life-disposition and resource recovery from manufactured products. While municipal resource recovery activities usually involve single material products such as glass, steel etc, and are handled by Material Recovery Facilities (MRF's), arrangements for commercial and household recycling of complex end-of-life products such as electronics are not as well developed. The effective recovery of products and materials from the millions of homes and small businesses distributed throughout the country to large scale processing centers needs to be addressed. Individually, these are of little interest, but collectively, these small businesses and homes represent an enormous source of materials and products for recycling and product sustainability. The specific problems of the efficient transportation of these materials has been given relatively little attention. This project proposes examining the impact of transportation on sustainability, to develop complete a preliminary analysis of the impact of transportation on the recycling of end of life products by faculty from the College of Business and the College of Engineering.
xx
12/30/2008
$83,941.00
Mr. James Ferguson, currently an undergraduate student in the department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, has expressed an interest in continuing as an M.S. student in the ISE department, and will work on the implemntation and analysis of reverse logistics models as part of his thesis work. Undergraduate students will also be recruited for analysis of recylcing options for consumer products, and will explore the transportation implications of established recycling programs.
The project proposed here is focused more on the transportation issues associated with recylcing and the contribution of transportation to the sustainability of product recovery networks.
The research detailed in this proposal will be presented as journal and conference papers, as well as workshops at academic and industrial meetings. The Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation has also expressed an interest on partnering in this project and we expect this partnership to facilitate technology transfer as well.
This proejct will increase the contribution towards sustainability by transportation systems. By evaluating efficient options for material collection of increasing end-of-life products, the negative impact of transportation on the recycling effort will be mitigated.
recycling, transportation