New situations call for a revision of strategies in the waste recycling and recovery sector. The guiding paradigm is that the evaluation and optimization of strategies ought to be integral, i.e. it ought to incorporate all steps from cradle to grave, all cost components and also to take into account all environmental aspects, as well as resource depletion. Furthermore, all variants of a comparison must have the same output and the same boundaries in space and time. Total cost (comprising also environmental damage and resource depletion) is proposed here as the evaluation function; environmental damage can be made operational by the DALY concept (Hofstetter P. Perspectives in life cycle impact assessment. Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1998) ('disability adjusted loss of life years') accounting for the years of life lost due to premature death, to illness or annoyance. The search for optimal strategies in the waste sector evidently requires the solution of a system with an enormous number of parameters; the method of genetic algorithms may represent a suitable solution paradigm, leading to the result in a reasonable computing time. (C) 2003 Published by Elsevier Ltd.