Logistic Network Design and Planning for a Glass Deposit-Refund System

Details

Supervisors

Semal, Pierre ; Tânia Rodrigues Pereira Ramos

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur de gestion, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

Over the last few years, waste generation has been increasing, and consequently, organisations have been defining policies to dimmish such trends. The European Union (EU) set a minimum recycling or reuse rate of 70% by 2025 for glass packaging waste. However, several countries are still under this target, including Portugal. The current national glass packaging waste system efficiency was 56% of recycling in 2020, far from the EU’s objectives. This led to the decision of studying the implementation of a beverage packaging Deposit- Refund System (DRS) in Portugal. In this way, this work aims to design and plan the DRS logistics network for Portugal with a focus on glass beverage containers. An extensive study of the DRS characteristics was made. The conceptual scheme was analysed, and DRS in other countries was studied. In addition, a literature review of the DRS topic was made. One key conclusion was that there is no literature concerning strategic network design models for DRS, which makes this work particularly relevant. A generic MILP, single-objective, cost-minimization formulation is developed to fulfil this research gap. The decisions concern facilities positioning, flow allocation, and high-level inventory planning. An application to the Portuguese case was made and validated with real data. The cost of the system in a five-year horizon would be around 66 million euros of which 14 million are fixed costs. The results of this work aimed at helping decision-makers to support better decisions regarding the DRS. However, limitations to the study were identified, which leads to future research development.