Logistics of carpet recycling in the US: designing the collection network

Efficient collection of post-consumer carpet is an important part of the carpet recycling process that helps to reduce the cost of recycled materials as well as provide sufficient volumes of carpet for recycling facilities. This paper focuses on the design of a collection network for carpet in the U.S. The location set covering optimization model formulated in the paper allows locating the minimum number of collection centers throughout the U.S. to reach a specific level of population coverage and as a result, a target collection rate. To solve real-scale instances of the problem, a novel randomized greedy heuristic is developed. The heuristic is shown to perform better than existing greedy heuristics in the literature. In addition, the paper presents the resulting nationwide carpet collection networks for different levels of population coverage. The results of the study can be used for U.S. carpet recycling policy-making decisions.