A soft-constrained multi-objective facility location approach for designing a network of household waste recycling centres in South Yorkshire

In the UK Government’s 25 Year Environment Plan, the location of municipal waste collection and recycling facilities plays a crucial role in achieving the Government’s recycling targets. Economic pressures are forcing UK local authorities to reorganise the network of household waste recycling centres (HWRCs) with the dual aim of reducing high operating costs and achieving high user satisfaction, whilst meeting specific legislative requirements. It becomes then paramount to support the optimal design of these networks considering the needs of all the stakeholders involved. We fill this gap by proposing a novel multi-objective facility location problem in waste management (WM) which formalises the underlying real-world scenario for the city of Sheffield in South Yorkshire, and by developing a soft-constrained version of the resulting problem to more accurately capture the actual dynamics driving the network design process. The resulting Pareto Sets are efficiently explored by the robust variant of the AUGMEnted (Formula presented.) -CONstraint method, and a computational characterisation of the proposed model is provided with benchmark instances from a real-world case study. Finally, in-depth scenario and sensitivity analyses provide quantitative and qualitative insights to support strategic planning and decision-making.