Methodology of Choosing the Most Eco-Friendly Waste Collection Truck

The waste collection in the territory of urban agglomerations, as a part of city logistics approaches, has become one of the key topics due to growing demands for logistic operations in cities burdened by high traffic volumes, worsening the quality of life and the environment in cities. Congested traffic ails České Budějovice, especially during peak hours. Congestions should partially be avoided by the planned construction of new roads to divert transit traffic from the city centre. Despite these remedial measures, the current transport and logistic situation requires further improvement. The paper focuses on waste collection, which significantly affects the traffic flow in České Budějovice. Currently, the city uses costly CNG-propelled trucks, which release a lot of harmful emissions. The paper aims to consider and evaluate new approaches to waste collection that could work in compliance with ecological principles and sustainable urban development of cities. This matter embraces waste collection trucks propelled by hydrogen, electricity, biogas and CNG. In other words, the decision needs to be made on whether it makes sense to invest in up-to-date and sustainable technologies to fuel waste collection trucks in a territory under investigation. To this end, multicriteria decision-making methods are applied, namely, Saaty and Fuller methods – to quantify the criteria weights, and the PROMETHEE and the ORESTE methods – to identify a compromise (ideal) variant. The findings encompass the decision-making process and a draft methodology concerning the determination of rank of the considered waste collection trucks based on relevant criteria set identified by the expert evaluation.