| Since the early 90's, waste management has become a " resources " management whose recovery can replace a part of the fossil natural resources consumption. In order to meet recovery targets set by the several waste management plans, the municipalities have to implement adapted waste recovery chains, in terms of collection, transport and treatment services. Waste processing leads thus to logistics, which can be complex and need to be planned so that the additional impacts associated with management activities do not offset the benefits arising from the exploitation of the resource.;Moreover, waste is a dispersed resource, subject to a great spatial variability (e.g. waste production rate). This has implications on the recovery chains performance and, especially, on the transport-related activities. In order to consider this spatial heterogeneity in waste management planning, this thesis presents a territorial approach to waste recovery chain's design. It relies on the definition of recovery potentials indicators associated to the sources. One potential represents the source's contribution to the global chain's efficiency by taking into account the sources' spatial distribution, their intrinsic characteristics (waste production, size) as well as the means of transport and treatment used.;This approach was first applied to different territorial conditions, in order to evaluate the economic relevance of installing a transfer station. The analysis showed the key role played by the local truck's capacity and the waste density in the hierarchical transport structure's viability. In a case study carried out in Montreal on organic waste recovery chains, potentials were then calculated for the city's districts. Their comparison allowed establishing the treatment sites' spatial scales, which heavily depended on the treatment technology implemented. In parallel, the analysis also highlighted the areas unfavourable to the management scenarios considered. Finding the causes of this low performance allowed targeting the needs in terms of system's improvement and, especially, the areas where this changes needed to happen. Therefore the approach presented in this thesis can be used as a decision-making tool for a localized diversification of recovery chains towards, in a long term, a better match between territorial context and the waste management options. By including the interactions between the chain's different processes (collection/transport/treatment), it also provides a systemic framework for a better overall planning of waste management activities. |
