Municipal Solid Waste Management Practices in Various Municipalities of Andhra Pradesh ― A Case Study from the Indian Sub-Continent

摘要

In India, Municipal Solid Wastes (MSW) comprises of domestic wastes, garden wastes, construction debris, poultry wastes, biomedical wastes etc. The main constituents of domestic wastes are vegetable ― putrescible matter (20-75%), inert matter (5-40%), glass (0-10%) and metals (0-15%) whereas the biomedical wastes are mainly constituted by soiled dressings, gauze, cotton swabs contaminated with blood, disposable syringes and needles, mutilated body parts etc. There are a number of potential risks to health and to the environment from improper handling of these solid wastes. Due to rapid growth in industrialization and urbanization, the magnitude and complexity of solid waste management in various municipalities of Andhra Pradesh is becoming a matter of serious environmental concern owing to lack of implementation of proper solid waste management plans. For suggesting suitable solid waste management plans, a critical study was made on the solid waste generation, collection, transportation and management practices in 84 Municipalities of Andhra Pradesh state (AP) and the corresponding data are discussed in this paper. The data on the MSW of 84 Municipalities/Corporations indicate that the quantity of Municipal solid wastes generated range from 0.27 to 1.6 kg/capita/day covering a population of nearly 6.2 crores. There is a significant gap between the per capita generation and collection of solid waste and adequate collection systems and transportation system are not available. Infrastructure facilities like weighbridge, fencing and lighting are not available except in some corporations. Provision for the gas venting and leach ate collections were also not made in the landfill sites. Biomedical/hospital solid waste, which is a major concern in public health perspectives, is being lifted along with municipal solid wastes in all these municipalities. As majority of these wastes is having high moisture and organic content biological processing methods such as composting and anaerobic digestion can be adopted for proper management of MSW to produce compost and biogas, respectively for beneficial use. For specialized wastes like hospital wastes, it may be essential to adopt incineration along with high calorific value industrial and commercial waste to reduce load on the sanitary landfills. The solid waste management practices in these municipalities were analyzed by adopting Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) for evaluating the problems of relative importance decision making hierarchy elements in management and ranking the suitability index for various alternatives in the management practices in MSW.