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Exploring social determinants of municipal solid waste management: survey processing with fuzzy logic and self-organized maps

  • Advances & Prospects in the field of Waste Management
  • Published:
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Abstract

In the present study, the establishment of decision-making criteria and a novel and robust interdisciplinary approach for systematically characterizing effects of uncertainties in social determinants of municipal solid waste management using an important fuzzy logic methodology is demonstrated. The primary goal is to highlight the social benefits of this waste management option such as job creation, hygiene and health protection, and working safety as well as to indicate certain side effects occurring during waste processing (odor and leachate production, social trust). The current research is based on a social survey in an agro-industrial region, Thessaly, Greece, and indicates a set of diversified key factors that are related to public acceptance of municipal waste management schemes. These features are input to Kohonen Self-Organized Maps (a special type of Artificial Neural Networks) for clustering residents according to their social perception and attitudes in terms of solid waste collecting and recycling. Both analyses highlight the environmental concern, social perception, hygiene and health, economic status, and lifestyle as the primary social determinants in affecting the public attitudes towards recycling. In both cases, these soft computing techniques seem to outperform the classical statistical and logical regression methodologies and become very promising in accurately predicting waste management practice and possibly other environmental behaviors.

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Abbreviations

Notation:

Definition

FL:

fuzzy logic

MSW:

municipal solid waste

SOM:

self-organized maps

ANN:

artificial neural network

ECGB:

environmental concern and general behavior

SPHH:

social perception hygiene and health

ESLF:

economic status and lifestyle

GB:

general behavior

SP:

social perception attitudes and beliefs

HH:

hygiene and health protection

BD:

behavior determinants towards waste production

LF:

lifestyle

Amean :

mean answer of all available data

GBmean/Amean :

ratio of mean-GB over Amean

SPmean/Amean :

ratio of mean-SP over Amean

HHmean/Amean :

ratio of mean-HH over Amean

BDmean/Amean :

ratio of mean-BD over Amean

LFmean/Amean :

ratio of mean-LF over Amean

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Telecommunications, University of Thessaly, Lamia, Greece

    Konstantinos Kokkinos

  2. Faculty of Engineering, University of Western Macedonia, Kozani, Greece

    Vayos Karayannis & Evangelia Lakioti

  3. School of Chemical Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece

    Konstantinos Moustakas

Authors
  1. Konstantinos Kokkinos
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  2. Vayos Karayannis
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  3. Evangelia Lakioti
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  4. Konstantinos Moustakas
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Correspondence to Konstantinos Moustakas.

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Responsible editor: Philippe Garrigues

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Appendix

Appendix

Table 5 Pair correlations between the SURVEY statistics and the FIS model statistics
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Table 6 Pairwise sample Statistics
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Kokkinos, K., Karayannis, V., Lakioti, E. et al. Exploring social determinants of municipal solid waste management: survey processing with fuzzy logic and self-organized maps. Environ Sci Pollut Res 26, 35288–35304 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-019-05506-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-019-05506-2

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