Recycling in a supply chain context - A case study regarding sorting and collection of four materials; plastics, paper, glass and metal in Eskilstuna Energi & Miljö, Sweden and Department Of Public Cleansing, Bangkok Metropolitan Administration, Thail

Sammanfattning: Recycling has been practiced from a decade, but become popular in recent years. The reverse logistics channel in supply chain context used for recycling differs from the forward flow logistics in many sub-areas. The objective of this thesis is based on the reverse logistics channel in supply chain context, which mainly focuses on several primary processes related with collection and sorting of solid waste, packaging, in relation to 4R’s strategy, which includes reduce, reuse, recycle and recover. The rapidly increasing of the population and industrial manufacturing, as well as an increasing of the consumption leading to an increasing of solid waste generation in Bangkok, Thailand. This is the challenge for us to find potential improvements to increase the recycle rate, reduced the contamination problems so that material recovery rate should be increase. This also results in saving national resources and energy from producing products from virgin material. However, the scope of this paper is in collection and sorting areas of waste material. Collection and sorting of waste material at Eskilstuna Energi & Miljö has been practiced from many years and continuously improving according to their yearly development plans. We reviewed the process in EEM as a model process for our research in comparison with municipal solid waste management in Bangkok, Thailand. The analysis and comparison between collection and sorting process in Eskilstuna Energi & Miljö and in Bangkok, Thailand, which reflects the strong points of the collection and sorting system at EEM in Sweden to apply in the improvement step in the weak points of system in Thailand. The comparison based on benchmarking methodology, which focus on four major areas including waste containers, collection, sorting and transportation. The conclusion includes the potential improvements in the current process in Thailand will be presented at the end. In this part we further divide it into two steps i-e short and long term improvements, which make the authorities, acts more specific in certain ways. We suggest a proposed layout of solid waste management in Thailand in the end according to the improvements. The suggestions for improvement plan are finalized in this area. The main purpose is to realize and contribute realize continuous improvement in the existing process of sorting and collection in Bangkok.   Keywords: Recycling, Reverse logistics, Supply chain, 4R, Collection, Sorting, Waste.