Since one of the main objectives of this study was to evaluate the potential effectiveness of different waste collection strategies to be applied to an actual waste management system, rather than to contribute to vehicle routing theory, commercially-available routing software, the Network Analyst (NA) extension of ESRI’s Arc- GISÒ ArcMap 9.3, was used. The features of the NA that make it par- ticularly suitable are the use of street-level mapping, in the form of network datasets, allowing for detailed routes to be calculated and to replicate certain characteristics, e.g. multiple depot locations or different vehicle types, while obeying the restrictions specified by the user. It uses the Dijkstra algorithm to determine the shortest path source–destination matrix of the network, and Tabu Search meta-heuristic as the VRP solving method. The commercial charac- ter of the software ESRI’s ArcGISÒ ArcMap 9.3 and its extensions dic- tates the protection of the detailed algorithms used for propriety reasons.