Development of a regional solid waste management framework and its application to a prairie province in central Canada.

• Waste collection and landfill siting are concurrently optimized at regional level. • Two original performance indicators, ACC and LMI, are proposed and implemented. • Road length is one of the most important optimization parameters in Saskatchewan. • Divisions that share provincial or international borders generally optimized better. • Indigenous communities in border sharing divisions need better landfill siting plan. Landfilling continues to be one of the most popular waste treatment methods in Canada or abroad. NIMBYism has forced waste facilities to be sited further from populated centers, meaning that increases in waste management efficiency result in considerable cost savings. Concurrent optimization of waste collection and disposal siting on a regional scale is of practical importance. This study combines collection route optimization and landfill siting using GIS methods to design a regional waste management system in Saskatchewan, Canada. Two original performance indicators are proposed based on route optimization and landfill siting, namely the accessibility (ACC) and Landfill Minimization Index (LMI). The result suggest that the accessibility was able to be improved by between 15.4 and 794.7%, and the optimization methods was always effective in providing higher resident accessibility. Improvements in the LMI yielded less improvement, ranging from -13.9% to +422.2%. Correlation analysis showed that road length is a key optimization parameter. This finding is important to Indigenous communities who suffer from a lack of intensified road network. Divisions that share provincial or international borders generally have higher improvements in ACC and LMI. Strategic placement of landfills and road networks are key to improve waste management system efficiency in Saskatchewan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]