Achievment of sustainable solid waste management in developing countries

Abstract: With an increasingly population and urbanization, the solid waste management have become a major challenge for local authorities in developing countries all over the world. The local authorities must improve their waste management in order to minimize the negative effects of solid waste and to avoid future land use conflicts. At the same time the economical resources are limited and solid waste management puts already today a significant pressure on the local economies. There is a need for a sustainable waste management which offer solutions to issues of social-, economical- and environmental aspects. This study aims to identify concepts for improving waste management in developing countries and evaluate them from a sustainability perspective. The report consists of a literature review and a case study. The literature review identifies different concepts and investigates the differences between developing countries to determine if it is possible to adopt the same concepts everywhere. Four different concepts for improving the waste management were identified; Integrated Solid Waste Management, Integration of the informal sector, Private Public Partnerships and Decentralization. The term of a developing country were found to lack a standard definition. In fact the differences between countries often referred to as developing were found to be significant in many aspects, even in waste characteristics. The conclusion is that waste management is a decentralized activity which needs decentralized solutions of how to achieve sustainable waste management. The case study uses the Kavango region in Namibia as an example for the possibilities of utilizing the different concepts. The first step in the case study was to find out about the current waste management. A mixed method of qualitative and quantitative research methods were used to map the current waste management. Examples of methods used are open ended interviews with key stakeholders and waste characterization studies. Two of the results were that only 0.11 kilogram solid waste is generated per person and day in the household and that the household waste consist of relatively low amounts of organic waste (26 %) and relatively high amounts of recyclable waste (> 50 %). The second step of the case study was to evaluate the current solid waste management from a sustainability perspective. Criteria for a sustainable waste management found in literature were used for a sustainability assessment of the current were management in the Kavango region. Out of eight criteria only two were fulfilled and due to poor efficiency, inability to cover it own costs and severe environmental impacts the conclusion is that the current waste management is unsustainable. The last step of the case study was to investigate the possibilities and effects of introducing different concepts for improving the waste management in the Kavango region. Several aspects of the concepts were already found in the current solid waste management, however possibilities exists to adopt the concepts in a much more comprehensive way. The conclusion is that the use of one concept does not rule out other concepts. In fact the concepts focus on different aspects of solid waste management and complement each other.