GLOBAL TRENDS IN WASTE GENERATION

摘要

In the last century, energy and material consumption increased extensively due to population growth, economic development and urbanization; and is responsible for generation of huge quantities of solid waste causing environmental hazards. At the beginning of 21st century, the importance of sustainable development has been realized globally and attempts are made to review the resource consumption patterns. In order to reduce the debit side of material consumption, solid waste management system should be developed in keeping with 3R Technologies (Reduce, Reuse and Recycle) by variety of techniques for resource recovery, waste minimization and proper disposal of solid waste. It is being thought that these issues have brought the design and development of solid waste management on international forum. In this endeavor, initially, it would be necessary to estimate the waste generation on global level. However, definition of waste and the method of measurement are different in each country. Moreover, in some of the developing countries, there are many cases where the data is not maintained. Therefore it is quite difficult to estimate and forecast waste generation. Solid waste generation is always associated with the economic status of a society. Based on this principle, in this paper, an attempt is being made to develop criteria to estimate and forecast the waste generation based on economic indicators.