Where to dispose of urban green waste? Transportation planning for the maintenance of public green spaces

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Where to dispose of urban green waste? Transportation planning for the maintenance of public green spaces

Meisel, Frank / Thiele, Nicole

Highlights • First paper on municipalities’ transportation planning for green space maintenance. • Combines various relevant ecological issues with cost-oriented logistics planning. • Joint decision support for transportation planning and booking of disposal capacity. • Provides a comprehensive case study for a large city in Germany.

Abstract Urban green spaces provide various social and environmental benefits that strongly improve the quality of life in a city. Municipalities are responsible for maintaining their green spaces in order to preserve these potentials. This paper supports municipalities in planning the transportation and disposal logistics of the green waste that is produced by the maintenance activities. The approach combines ecological issues like the seasonality of green waste generation and different types of biomass with economically driven decision making. We show how to determine cost efficient transportation plans for the disposal logistics and how to capture the seasonality of green waste generation when booking capacities at disposal facilities. It is also shown how a municipality can select the disposal facilities to cooperate with in a competitive environment where facilities offer capacities at differing conditions, as is the case for disposal sites that dump the green waste and for conversion plants that use the biomass for producing renewable energy. We illustrate the approach using case data of a major city in Germany.