A Participatory Approach for Addressing Challenges in Waste Collection

Decisions related to waste collection are examples of multicriteria decision-making situations, in which the decision-makers are typically confronted with concerns related to regulatory demands, costs, environmental issues, user preferences, technical issues and feasibility. Overall, decision-making related to waste collection is a social process that requires coordination and consensus-building between many different actors and stakeholders. In order to support decision-making related to waste collection, we propose the application of different methods for multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) for gathering the views of the experts and stakeholders that need to be involved. It is considered that MCDM could be used for collecting input and reaching consensus between different actors that participate in the process. Besides actual decision-making, MCDM methods can be used for structuring the discussion and sharing the views of the participants, as part of consensus building.