Transporting household waste over water can reduce costs and emissions: A case study in the Netherlands

Inland waterways can be an attractive under-utilized alternative to road transport. In the current situation, heavy trucks transport residual household waste from municipalities to incineration plants around the Netherlands. Logistics research groups have suggested using barge pushing ships for household waste transport to reduce emissions and costs. We analyze this suggestion for a case study involving the residual household waste of 55 municipalities across three provinces in the Netherlands. A Mixed Integer Linear Programming formulation is used to find the optimal combination of trucks and barge pushing ships in this waste network. The results demonstrate that adopting electric pusher ships can achieve significant reductions in costs (19%), emissions (41%), and waste carrying truck traffic (48%), compared to truck-only solutions. Diesel cargo ships are also shown to outperform truck-only approaches but are less effective than electric alternatives in most metrics. Sensitivity analysis shows that the solutions are fairly robust to parameter variations.