Browsing by Author "Abdul-Barik, Alhassan"

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    Location of semi-obnoxious facility and the transportation of solid waste in the Northern Region of Ghana. Case study: Zoomlion Ghana limited
    (2012-06-08) Abdul-Barik, Alhassan
    Waste includes all items that people no longer have any use for, which they either intend to get rid of or have already discarded. Additionally, wastes are such items which people are require to discard, for example by law because of their hazardous properties. The United Nations and other agencies estimate worldwide annual waste production at more than 1 billion tons, and some estimates go as high as 1.3 billion (European Environment Agency, 2009). There are a number of different options available for the management of waste of which landfilling or disposal even though should be the last resort is however largely practiced in Africa and the West. Waste management in Ghana is by mainly identifying dumping sites, instituting vantage collection points and conveying the waste to the various dumping site(s). When the urban roads in northern Ghana are constructed, and collection points of waste are properly sited then the waste management company can now efficiently convey waste to the dump sites on time. This will eventually provoke the conscience of the people about the need for environmental cleanliness and healthy living conditions. There can then be a paradigm shift of waste management by merely moving from collection to dumping sites in Northern Region to management of waste by re-use, minimization and prevention, and recycling. The thesis therefore looks at scientific methods of dump-site location (method of factor-rating for facility location) using secondary data from Zoomlion Ghana Limited. The Floyd-Warshall’s algorithm is used specifically for the shortest path of transporting the waste from the various collection points to the dump-site. Matlab is the programming language used for the analysis which shows that, Gbalahi is the best site for the location of the semi-obnoxious facility (dump-site) by Zoomlion Ghana Limited, and that taking a detour or transit to the dump-site in most cases constitutes a shorter path than a direct path.