Disposal of Urban Wastes

The role of solid waste management in sustainable development become increasingly important with the accelerating urbanization worldwide. The urban lifestyles produces waste in larger quantity and diverse quality. This phenomenon stimulates and challenges both the innovation of treatment technologies as well as the development of institutional and legislation instruments in regulating waste sorting at the point of collection, waste transportation and the integration of waste treatment technologies within an urban system. We argue that to achieve urban sustainability, designing a customized integrated waste management plan to suit socio-cultural contexts and economic capacity of a site of a city is the key. The indicators used for evaluating performance of such waste management plan may drive the direction of the waste management approach and should not only focus on one aspect of sustainability such as GHG emission though this environmental issues is shared globally. Further, the public education on waste sorting may be the key factor to optimize the expected outcome of an integrated waste management plan. Developed countries are more advantageous from this aspect of social development than the developing countries in achieving desirable outcome. To improve sustainability in waste management at global scale, some technology transfer from developed countries to developing countries can be helpful. However, affordability and site-specificity need to be taken into account.