Abstrakt
Huge amounts of household batteries are discarded in the municipal waste stream annually. While the cadmium and mercury content of newer batteries has been reduced, the accumulated total of mercury and cadmium in older batteries, as well as other metals in various types of all batteries still constitute a potential health risk.
Many countries initiated collection programs to remove this source of contamination from our environment and municipal waste streams. Developed countries have enacted legislation regulating the collection and disposal of household batteries.
According to the European, US, Japan and other countries' legislation used batteries and accumulators are regarded as hazardous waste. They must be separately collected and sent to recovery and recycling plants.
In the highly developed countries annually collection levels achieved in practice typically surpass 100 g of spent batteries per inhabitant. In this contribution a new management tool for collection of used household batteries is presented, in order to optimize the total costs and other environmental factors.
The geographic information system (GIS) is used to provide spatial data management and service area analysis by methods implemented in the GIS network analysis extensions. The optimization of transportation costs is based on the transportation algorithm in linear programming of the operations research.
The results are aggregated into the thematic maps, which show transport paths to central recycling plants from customers, which are represented by total amounts of annually collected batteries located in district units. The central recycling plants or temporary storage sites can be located in dependence on optimization of total transportation costs.
The optimization of total transportation costs and other criteria based on environmental and social factors, can support sustainable optimization of the way in which batteries are discarded and its changes in response to a number of challenges including meeting the expanding and shifting battery market in an urbanized world, preventing pollution and minimizing avoidable risk by utilizing suitable technological solutions. (C) 2018 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.