Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to review the types of models that are currently being used in the area of municipal waste management
and to highlight some major shortcomings of these models. Most of the municipal waste models identified in the literature
are decision support models and for the purposes of this research, are divided into three categories—those based on cost benefit
analysis, those based on life cycle assessment and those based on multicriteria decision making. Shortcomings of current waste
management models include that they are concerned with refinements of the evaluation steps (e.g. stage four of AHP or the
improvement of weight allocations in ELECTRE) rather than addressing the decision making process itself. In addition, while
many models recognise that for a waste management model to be sustainable, it must consider environmental, economic and social
aspects, no model examined considered all three aspects together in the application of the model.
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