Case study on solid waste mangement in Dhaka City

Abstract

Solid waste management is considered as one of the most immediate and serious environmental problems confronting municipal authorities in developing Asian Countries. Rapid growth of population and industrialization degrades the urban environment and places serious stress on natural resources, which undermines equitable and sustainable development. Inefficient management and disposal of solid waste is an obvious cause of degradation of the environment in most cities like Dhaka. Although Dhaka City Corporation (DCC) acknowledges the importance of adequate solid waste collection and disposal as well as resource recovery and recycling, it is mostly beyond their resource to deal effectively with the growing amount of solid waste generated by the expanding cities. Consequently solid waste is indiscriminate by dumped on roads and into open drains thus leading to serious health risk and degradation of living environment for millions of urban people. In the last decade, however, importance of community involvement in solid waste management and use of adapted technologies were recognized for improving the solid waste management system. There exist a few studies that deal with the estimation of solid waste generation in Dhaka city. However, these studies, which are mostly based on the naive forecasting approaches, cannot predict the amount of waste correctly as evident from a considerable mismatch between predicted and actual waste generation reported by DCC. In the present study, regression analysis is employed to estimate the generation of waste in Dhaka city that shows considerable agreement between the predicted and actual amounts of waste generation. In this study primary data was obtained from interviews with 100 families in Dhaka City and secondary data were collected from various sources (internet, publications, etc.) to estimate total quantity of household waste generated in Dhaka. Waste generation with respect to various factors (such as population growth, new consumer product in market, income level, and education) is also analyzed. The present study develops a forecast for future waste generation that can assist in managing the waste in an effective way so that the adverse effect of generated waste on environment can be minimized.