PROCESS OF SOLID WASTE MANAGEMENT

PROCESS OF SOLID WASTE MANAGEMENT

Solid waste management involves a complex process, which is broadly divisible into generation, collection, transportation and disposal. Where the scope of this research is practically limited to collection and disposal, generation and transportation are also implied.

There is no gain saying the fact that solid waste management is labor intensive. There is no way up till date any were that solid waste from individual house hold can be collected and transported to final disposal sites without a number of workers being involved at the task of physical removal, where the practice is to encourage collection point along selected street or backstreets, the workers are needed to park them into trucks.

Also the much advocated strategy of encouraging households to bring their waste to depot only minimizes but does not remove heavy dependence on labor. Naturally this has serious implication for the type of waste management system to be adopted as well as its likely level of efficiency.

WASTE RECYCLING

United nation Environmental project (UNEP) presented a document titled closing the loop, which suggested that a great challenge facing the global community is to make it a closed system. This could not only save energy, reduce waste and pollution as well as cost and would enhance sustainability.

Two key elements were identified for this to happen. First, industry should move towards the idea of eco efficiency as embodied in the cleaner production approach, this means getting the maximum raw materials and energy. It also means preventing the production of waste at source rather than having to clear up the mess afterwards. On the other hand, even with the cleaner production approach applied to the full, industrial activity will produce waste.

Hence the second key element closing the loop, thus, waste should be recycled in the industrial economy, just as materials are in the biosphere. Ojesina and Longe said that although there is no central recycling facility in Nigeria, human scavengers are seen almost in the entire disposal site removing items such as metal scraps, plastics and so on. It has been argued that government can play a crucial role in boosting recycling.

Studies of the overall cycling materials in the economy can highlight priority, waste steams for recycling. Product specification or standards need to be amended to enable the use of recovered waste as public participation through fiscal, legal and public education. Experiences abound across nations on this issue and have led to advantages, and improvements in the pitfalls of these types of policies.

In developed nations, compulsory collection of recyclable wastes has reduced packaging waste and increased recycling rates. This however, distorts markets for recyclable materials and often harms recycling industries in other countries on the other hand; Belgium and Denmark have instituted new taxes on some materials to help recycling. In the United States, encouragement of recycling in the city of Long Beach has created 1000 jobs. It is the responsibility of governments to control recycling as well as encouraged it, as it is an activity that could be polluting.

While the recyclable materials are traded as raw materials and abuse of the system by some waste traders who export hazardous materials to developing countries where pollution measures are not so strong .However simply to recycle waste is not an end itself, the main should be to improve economic efficiency, to reduce pollution and reduce the volume of final waste. For some waste, there are powerful arguments for incineration with energy recovery, rather than material recycling. Only a proper analysis taking into account the life cycle implication can show which should be the preferred option.