Informal chat: Dr Elias Willemse
Channel: Johan Joubert
Date: 12/05/2023

In this video, I chat with Dr. Elias J. Willemse about optimizing the waste collection, a challenging commodity (if you think about it that way) to carry in logistics. The product itself has very little value, but moving it (all) to ensure healthy and livable cities is essential.

For easier navigation:
00:00 - Talk overview
00:56 - Personal introduction
06:00 - Waste collection
06:54 - Perception change on waste collection, recycling, and sustainability
08:30 - Operational, tactical, and strategic problems in waste collections
09:30 - Operational problems in waste collection: very large scale, ability to offload at different facilities, large vehicles requiring accurate planning
12:30 - Tectical problems: vehicle types, insource, outsource
15:20 - Strategic problem: location problems (treatment and depots), acquisition of competitors, expanding to new markets
18:00 - Interactions between operations, technical, and strategy, with examples, maps, and animations
24:00 - The interplay between optimization and fragile, robust, and anti-fragile systems
28:15 - Robust systems under uncertainty with examples from the waste collection in Singapore
32:15 - Small-agile and anit-fragile companies vs. large companies
33:45 - How well the field of optimization is dealing with variability, the difference between academic vs. practice, and the practical power of simple heuristics
37:00 - What is next for Waste Labs, and the journey from studying something, mastering and then turning it into a company