Poor design of any of these processes increases operational cost and can result in environmental pollution. Solid waste management involves the processes of generation, collection, transport, treatment, value recovery, and subsequent disposal. These challenges go beyond the ability of local authorities in developing countries to effectively manage solid waste. The situation is exacerbated by the high generation rate of waste which results from rapid urbanization and population growth, inadequate financing, poor waste disposal attitudes of citizenry, and lack of political will. A study by Amoah and Kosoe stated that the development of an effective and environmentally sustainable system for solid waste management is a major challenge to developing economies. The management of solid waste has become a major environmental issue due to its negative consequences on the society and environmental systems if not properly executed. Solid waste refers to rubbish, trash, junk, and garbage, depending on the type of material or regional terminology, and is the unwanted material from manufacturing processes or community or household activities. For enhanced efficiency of the vehicle routing systems, studies should further focus on incorporating all network constraints, environmental pollution considerations, and impact of land use changes on routing. Incorporating environmental pollution consideration is very challenging in this approach, the vehicle routing problem solver encountering limits for large data. Geographic information system approaches allow processing of additional considerations, often ignored in other methods, such as the street network modeling. They however provide partial solutions when implemented in reality and cannot fully handle road network constraints. Mathematical programming approaches maximize or minimize an objective function for improvement in procedure, to ensure operational efficiency and also serve as decision support tools. This paper reviews the effect of applying optimization methods on the collection process of solid waste, with particular interest in mathematical programming and geographic information system approaches in developing countries.
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