Two aspects of waste management from the viewpoints of a waste generator and a recipient

Abstract

Regulations specify the maximum amount of waste that can be stored on site by a waste generating firm. When this regulatory threshold is reached, a polluting firm must move its on site waste to an off site recipient. In this setting, we analyse two questions in a stochastic framework from the viewpoints of a waste generator and a recipient that have received scant theoretical attention in the literature. First, given that off site storage is costlier than on site storage, we derive the long-run average cost incurred by a waste generating firm that stores waste both on and off site. Second, we compute the expected amount of time until the off site recipient's waste storage facility is full.

Acknowledgement

Batabyal acknowledges financial support from the Gosnell endowment at RIT. The usual disclaimer applies.

Notes

¹ The reader should go to http://dep.state.ct.us/wst/mercury/uwrule.htm to see examples of Connecticut's regulatory requirements pertaining to the management of ‘universal waste’. In addition, the reader should see United States Department of Energy (1999) for more information on hazardous waste generator requirements.

² The renewal function gives us the average number of renewals that have occurred by a certain time. See Tijms (2003, pp. 35–7) for more on the renewal function.

³ The excess random variable is the time elapsed from renewal time point t until the next renewal after time point t. See Tijms (2003, pp. 37–8) for more on the properties of this excess random variable.

⁴ See Ross (2003, pp. 36–7) and Tijms (2003, pp. 441–2) for more on the properties of the gamma distribution.