(375n) Optimal Location of Industrial Plants Considering Economic and Environmental Issues Simultaneously

For the location of a new industrial plant usually are considered exclusively economic issues, without considering the environmental impact that the effluents of the new plant may produce over the surrounding water sheds. Once a new plant is installed, the pollution problems produced are identified and there is required to install new equipments to treat the wastewater streams to satisfy the environmental regulations, this situation represents significant additional costs for the industry, which may yield an economically inefficient process. Water sheds are the means where all effluents are transported until their final disposal, in the water sheds the streams are naturally mixed and separated, in addition to the natural degradation for the wastes due to the chemical reactions experimented, these processes modify the streams properties. Therefore, the wastewater treatment costs for a new plant depend significantly on its localization. This paper presents a new mixed integer non linear programming model (MINLP) for the optimal location of a new industrial plant satisfying the environmental regulations for the wastewater streams discharged to the environment to ensure the sustainability for the water shed. In the proposed model, the mass integration inside the plant is considered together with the mass integration with the water shed. The model was formulated to predict the behavior for the water shed impacted for the new polluted discharges, to make this task, the material flow analysis (MFA) technique was used. In the MFA model, the industrial, residential, agricultural, etc. discharges and all extractions are considered as well as the chemical reactions that are carryout in the rivers. The water shed model is combined with a disjunctive model for the optimal location of a new industrial plant through the waste integration and satisfying the environmental regulations. The model allows the optimal selection of the type of treatment, and the objective function consists in minimizing the total annual cost that is constituted by the wastewater treatment costs, location of the new plant cost (location cost includes the transportation for raw materials, products and services, as well as the land cost). The MINLP model was implemented in the software GAMS and the solver DICOPT was used to prove the proposed algorithm through the solution of several examples where no numerical complications were observed.