Optimizing Waste Flows in the OSU Network
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Date
2007-06
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
The purpose of this project is to develop a comprehensive model of waste flows at The Ohio State University to enable cost-effective waste reduction. The ultimate goal will be to establish effective solutions that help OSU to move beyond environmental compliance, and take pro-active steps to operate with minimum adverse impact on the environment. This project represents an opportunity to reverse the traditional notion of waste and apply industrial ecology concepts to explore the effectiveness of applying a systems perspective to sustainable modeling.
The model will take the form of EcoFlow™. Developed by researchers at the Center for Resilience at OSU, EcoFlow™ models waste flows in complex networks including multiple inputs, outputs, and decision nodes, to develop a resilient waste management system. In application to OSU, six waste generators were analyzed as input sources that generated five different types of waste. Flow pathways, both currently under operation and hypothetical, provide routes for waste materials to be processed into economically valuable products or energy. Examples of pathways analyzed in the model include recycling, composting, and the capture and utilization of methane gas.
The application of EcoFlow™ utilizes operations research techniques, namely integer programming. This allows for mass balance equations, capacity constraints, and both transportation and operating costs to be integrated into the model to best optimize the objective function. In the case of OSU, the model is programmed to maximize profits within the network. Furthermore, each pathway will be analyzed to show the potential environmental and economic benefits to the waste generator and the waste consumer and how this interacts with the University’s triple bottom line, which includes economic, environmental, and social potentials.
Results provide the University with a model of their current waste system and recommend best practices for operation. However most importantly, the OSU EcoFlow™ model offers the University an important tool that systematically optimizes waste flow while simultaneously creating a network that is both economically and ecologically resilient.
Advisors: Joseph Fiksel and Jerald
Brevick
Description
Keywords
Industrial Ecology, Operations Research