Municipal waste management: Recycling and landfill space constraints

Consider a municipality which must design a waste management program that integrates recycling and optimal landfill use. This paper provides a theoretical model of waste management which is dynamic, as it must be for landfill exhaustion problems, but is also simple enough that planners can readily adapt it to the problem at hand. A municipality that recycles (i) will always simultaneously recycle and use its landfill for some time interval during which (ii) recycling is always increasing while landfill use is declining and (iii) there exists an upper bounden the length of this interval which is independent of the size of the landfill and the municipality's planning horizon. (C) 1997 Academic Press