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Nowadays, the amounts of infectious medical waste (IMW) have surged considerably so waste management has become a critical emergency in many developing countries. However, most large medical waste generation centers (MWGC) are equipped with treatment facilities, small MWGC faces the waste management problem. It reveals the significance of having a proper program for small health centers. This is an indisputable difficulty that governments bordered because it imposes great costs on societies, also the environmental problems caused by improper treatment are irreparable. To attend to all the essential aspects of the problem, this paper recommended a location-routing model with four objective functions to minimize the total costs, environmental pollution, the risk imposed on the population around disposal sites, and the total violation from the expected arrival time. Considering a multi-period problem with a maximum acceptable delay plays a key role to connect the assumptions to the real-world problem. In addition, for solving mathematical models based on case studies, the role of uncertainty is undeniable. The demand for dental waste treatment is not definite and is changed based on the different conditions thus fuzzy chance-constrained programming is proposed for this problem to tackle the uncertainty. The revised multi-choice goal programming method is considered to solve the model and a real case study for dental clinics in Babol city of Iran is investigated to illustrate the validation of the proposed model. The results indicate that the solution method can create a balance between four objective functions. Finally, sensitivity analyses are performed for some parameters to analyze the behavior of the objective functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop a multicriteria approach, based on both scalarization and goal programming techniques, in order to analyze the trade off between economic growth and environmental outcomes in a framework in which the economy and environment relation is bidirectional. On the one hand, economic growth by stimulating production activities gives rise to emissions of pollutants which deteriorate the environment. On the other hand, the environment affects economic activities since pollution generates a production externality determining how much output the economy can produce and reducing welfare. In this setting we show that optimality dictates an initial overshooting followed by economic degrowth and rising pollution. This implies that independently of the relative importance of economic and environmental factors, it is paradoxically optimal for the economy to asymptotically reach the maximum pollution level that the environment is able to bear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]