The sustainable landfill: an integrated service for the environment

This paper aims to contribute to the debate on waste management with the intention of considering the waste cycle as an integrated service using the logical scheme proper to network analysis. Its optimization involves the identification of critical nodes and bottlenecks that prevent the system from achieving balances in line with circularity and sustainability. Providing for a sustainable landfill, as a necessary building block that cleanly closes the material cycle, imposes the constraint that produces backward effects throughout the supply chain, even to the point of changing the structure of the entire network. A simple model shows that the lifespan of a landfill, in the absence of economic constraints, depends on the actions put in place upstream of the final storage phase, which will have to be all the more incisive the greater the community's aversion to the creation of landfills.