The environmental impact of different methods for dealing with municipal solid waste is examined in the light of public opinion, and the future of landfilling is discussed. Measures adopted by some Member States of the European Union in order to tackle their waste packaging and in order to renovate their waste management are presented. The effect of the German Packaging Ordinance on the recovery industry in Europe is analysed together with the changes brought about in the waste collection industry by the application of the polluter-pays-principle. The evolution of EU environmental policy since the adoption of the Treaty of Rome is described and relevant Directives and Court cases are referred to in order to illustrate EU waste policy. The conflicting attitudes of the public, governments and waste and packaging industries are underlined and the problem of waste definition is also raised. Finally, a numerical model is presented which uses FORTRAN as a programming language. The model is designed to compare the profitability of different collection and sorting methods and to find the optimal way of achieving a particular recycling target. The optimisation technique of simulated annealing is applied to the problem. The model is implemented for a typical medium sized town in the UK and the results obtained are presented.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:636100 |
| Date | January 1995 |
| Creators | Biod, A. J. |
| Publisher | Swansea University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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