Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
One of the major components of household waste is organic material such
as kitchen and garden waste, typically comprising 43 percent by weight of an
average household's waste in the Flemish region of Belgium. and may include
vegetables, fruit, cooked and processed foods, weeds, grass, leaves, and other
garden waste. The higher the annual average income of people in a munici-
pality, the higher the amount of waste. A fortnightly collection of waste yields
lower amounts of waste than a once-a-week collection round does (Gellynck and
Verhelst 2007).
As mentioned before, developing countries in general produce less MSW. For
example, the average amount of waste generated in Cuba is only 87 g per capita
per day in the Santiago de Cuba Province (Mosler et al. 2006). The recycling rates
are rather high, as the households have established different disposal strategies as
a function of the waste type. Forty percent of the households feed organic waste
to animals like pigs and chickens. Plastic, aluminum, and glass are separated
at household level and stored until collection. The study of the municipal solid
waste in Dakar (Senegal, Africa) indicated that solid waste management is a
severe problem in big cities of developing countries (Kapepula et al. 2007).
Their result tends to confirm a generally observed rule that people with higher
income produce more garbage. Solid waste generation in the city of Mekelle,
Northern Ethiopia has been increasing, however; per capita waste generation in
Mekelle is estimated to vary between 0.30 kg/day and 0.33 kg/day (Tadesse et al.
2008). On average, only one-third has been collected and disposed. Solid waste
collection service at household level by the municipality of Mekelle is primarily
carried out using door-to-door collection services by tractor-trailers and collection
service using fixed-point communal containers.
In Asia, the World Bank (1999) reported that residential solid waste represents
about 30 percent of the overall municipal waste stream. It is estimated that
the per capita waste generation rate in six major urban areas of Bangladesh is
between 0.25 and 0.56 kg per day (Sujauddin et al. 2008). About 66 percent
of this is compostable. The large organic concentration in urban solid waste
indicates the necessity for frequent collection and removal. This also suggests
the good potential for recycling of organic waste.
A number of socioeconomic variables may affect the quantity of solid waste
generated each day by a household. These include religion, family size, family
employment, age, education, land status, and duration of stay. Composition of
solid waste depends on a number of factors, such as food habits, cultural tradi-
tions, socioeconomic status, and climatic condition. In 2005, the average daily
amount generated per capita was 0.92 kg in Hangzhou, China (Zhuang et al.
2008). With a 4.1 million population, the total MSW is approximately 1.38 mil-
lion tonnes and the average increase rate was about 3.3 percent over the past five
years. About 60 percent of the MSW is disposed by landfill, and the remaining
40 percent by incineration. In comparison to the composition of MSW in other
developed countries, the quantity of food waste in the studied communities is
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