All Hazards Waste Logistics Tool: Version 2
Citation:
Boe, T., P. Lemieux, M. Rodgers, P. Dziemiela, AND C. Hayes. All Hazards Waste Logistics Tool: Version 2. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, 2022.
Impact/Purpose:
All Hazards Waste Logistics Tool addresses the need to evaluate considerations related to the resource demands associated with transporting and disposing of large volumes of waste. The tool calculates the cost and time to manage a user-specified quantify of waste and allows users to run routing scenarios with user-defined destinations. Factors specific to waste type, transport mode, hauling rates, and waste management facility acceptance rates allow users to explore options and evaluate constraints to improve preparedness for managing large volumes of waste. The Waste Staging and Storage Site Selection Tool was designed to work in tandem with the All Hazards Waste Logistics Tool to identify potential staging locations to be included in the logistics decision-making process.
Description:
Large-scale disasters have the potential to generate a significant amount of varying types of waste. For example, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 resulted in 64.3 million cubic yards of debris in Louisiana, and Mississippi managed an estimated 46 million cubic yards of debris from Hurricane Katrina. The 2011 Joplin, Missouri tornado resulted in three million cubic yards of debris throughout the disaster area, respectively. Man-made chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) incidents either by way of terrorism, war, or accident have the potential to generate as much waste or more, and both natural and man-made incidents are prone to generate some form of hazardous waste. Recovery is profoundly impacted by waste management issues and the strategies selected to manage those issues. The quantification, segregation of different waste types, transportation, and storage of waste can be an arduous and costly undertaking. Furthermore, these processes are intricately linked with the decisions made throughout the recovery timeline. Therefore, the remediation, including waste management, must be holistically considered. Understanding these complex interactions can be facilitated by using models and tools that adhere to the “system-of-systems” approach. To better understand and predict waste management issues, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) Homeland Security Research Program (HSRP) developed a suite of tools and resources for planning and recovery purposes. EPA’s All Hazards Waste Logistics Tool uses spatial information and analysis techniques to support evaluating resource demands associated with transporting large volumes of waste. The tool was developed to help decision makers (e.g., state, local, tribal and territorial governments and federal partners) better understand potential options, including cost and time tradeoffs, for managing waste and to illuminate potential capacity constraints, transportation considerations, and impact of waste categorization to inform increased preparedness.
