Practical Optimization Methods for Finding Best Recycling Pathways of Plastic Materials

Optimization methodologies have been proposed of find the best environment-friendly recycling pathways of plastic materials based on life-cycle assessment (LCA) methodology. The main difficulty in conducting this optimization study is that multiple environmental burdens have to be considered simultaneously as the cost functions. Instead of generating conservative Pareto or noninferior solutions following multi-objective optimization approaches, we have proposed some practical criteria on how to combine the different environmental burdens into a single measure. The obtained single objective optimization problem can then be solved by conventional nonlinear programming techniques or, more effectively, by a tree search method based on decision flows. The latter method reduces multi-dimensional optimization problems to a set of one-dimensional problems in series. It is expected the suggested tree search approach can be applied to many LCA studies as a new promising optimization tool.