Municipal Solid Waste Collection: Challenges, Strategies and Perspectives in the Optimization of a Municipal Route in a Southern Mexican Town

Solid waste management represents a challenge for municipalities, particularly at the collection stage. The high costs involved in its operation make it difficult to provide the service in all its communities, which results in bad practices (burning, burying, or dumping into a river) and the proliferation of open dumps. Collection efficiency is aggravated by poor route planning, narrow road networks, and irregular scheduling. This research proposes and develops the following objectives: (1) an analysis of the technical and logistical conditions of a town, (2) an improved municipal route for waste collection, and (3) the practical implications identified in the optimization of the service (challenges, strategies, and perspectives). During the study period (2018, 2019 and 2021), the following steps were carried out: (1) field trips to monitor the formal and informal routes, georeferencing each stop with a global positioning system, (2) semi-structured interviews to route personnel to learn about technical and logistical aspects, (3) the downloading of cartographic data for digitization, and (4) a network analysis aimed at designing an optimal route for formal collection and the spatial scope of the informal routes. The current technical and logistical analysis detected inefficiency in collection due to weak municipal operational planning and the irregular frequency of visits to the locality. The locality produces an average of 2.8 tons per day and its largest volume is organic waste (68.3%), followed by non-recyclable inorganic waste (21.2%), and recyclable waste (10.5%). In terms of results for the optimization of the municipal collection route, it is estimated that there will be an improvement in the time of the day of approximately 2 h less, going through 95 points when its schedule is 60 collection points, while the distance factor does not suffer changes due to the fact that there are no alternate routes between the departure and destination route. Among the main challenges faced by the municipalities are the limited budgets for basic sanitation services, which is why technological strategies and trained human resources are required for better municipal solid waste management. From a technical perspective, geographic information systems are a current trend to model and optimize service routes, with which a better scenario can be proposed. From a social perspective, community participation works as a key factor to carry out activities focused on finding solutions to the problems related to municipal solid waste management.