5.1 Integrating biowaste management through strategic planning

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From the course by École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Municipal Solid Waste Management in Developing Countries

1138 ratings

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Municipal Solid Waste Management in Developing Countries

1138 ratings

Have you come across large piles of garbage in neighborhoods and streets, or smelly waste disposal sites polluting the environment of low and middle income countries? Are you also convinced that improvements are necessary and do you want to know what kind of sustainable solutions are appropriate to better manage waste and enhance recycling and recovery? If yes, this course is for you! This course provides an overview of the municipal solid waste management situation in developing countries covering key elements of the waste management system, with its technical, environmental, social, financial and institutional aspects. Besides understanding the challenges you will learn about appropriate and already applied solutions through selected case studies. The course also covers strategic planning and policy issues discussing future visions for waste management and the aspect of a circular and green economy. Considering the importance of the organic waste fraction, the course covers several organic waste treatment technology options such as composting, anaerobic digestion, and some other innovative approaches. MOOC SERIES “SANITATION, WATER AND SOLID WASTE FOR DEVELOPMENT” This course is one of four in the series “Sanitation, Water and Solid Waste for Development". Please visit the course page for more information.

From the lesson

Week 5: Assessment and planning methods for Solid Waste Management

During the last week, the modules will focus more on strategic aspects of MSWM. Methods on how to integrate organic waste management into the municipal SWM system will be explained. Furthermore a standardized method to evaluate and compare systems with regard to their performance will be presented as well as the relevance of waste management and its impacts on climate change. Finally, the course will conclude with some reflections on the future of waste management introducing the concept of circular economy.

5.1 Integrating biowaste management through strategic planning10:31

5.2 Comparing cities' performance12:48

5.3 Waste and climate change11:29

5.4 Circular economy and solid waste management9:21

5.5 Key messages Week 52:42

Meet the Instructors

Dr. Christian Zurbrügg

Sanitation, Water and Solid Waste for Development / Eawag
Imanol Zabaleta

Sanitation, Water and Solid Waste for Development / Eawag
Félix Schmidt

Sanitary Engineering, Water and Waste Management / EPFL

In this module I want to share with you some thoughts about strategic planning

in waste management, and specifically with regard to integrating biowaste

management into the municipal system. So, why biowaste management? Let me briefly repeat

what we have learned so far on biowaste management. Biowaste is the largest

fraction, with over half of all municipal waste consisting of biowaste.

When collected and disposed of in neighborhood, biowaste may impact

negatively on the environment, while degrading. It may generate methane, a potent

greenhouse gas. Biowaste is also an environmental threat. Leachate from biowaste

pollutes groundwater and surface water and biowaste may attract or even

promote disease-carrying vectors, like flies or rodents. It is also an

underutilized resource, whereas recyclables like glas, metal, paper

and even some fractions of plastic already have a quite well established

recycling market, biowaste is still struggling. However, treatment

technologies exist.

You've heard about them in the previous modules and municipalities are slowly

but surely becoming more and more aware of the potential to manage biowaste as a

separate fraction and make use of this resource. But how to go about this in a

well planned and systematic way? What to choose?

Often decisions are taken like: Oh, what should we do? Or, what do the donors

suggests? Ok, we'll just do composting at the landfill and that might work.

Actually and unfortunately it will probably not work. In this module I

should try to guide you through some planning steps, to come up with some

informed decision on what to do with biowaste. The planning steps we shall go

through are those typical of any project planning cycle as you see in this graph.

Something you might have come across already. The first step is identifying

problems and needs based on an assessment of the existing situation.

Then, developing goals, generating, weighting objectives and elaborating on potential

actions to meet these objectives.

The next step is then preparing scenarios that address the alternative

futures in biowaste management comparing each scenarios impact, costs and

constraints and examining stakeholders willingness to pay for or cooperate. Then

developing and reaching a consensus on both selection criteria and the choice

among scenarios that best address the objectives. And then finally, following

through with implementation, operation, monitoring, evaluation and adaptation,

summarized in these boxes. The first step involves a preparation and initiation

of the planning process.As well as framing the problem. You want to make

sure to have support of key stakeholders, typically the local authorities, but also

ensuring enough human and financial resources to conduct the process. This

will include a professional facilitator as well as technical experts for the

appraisal of options later. Then, the next step is to identify the relevant

stakeholders for this participatory process. A subsequent task is to then

frame the decision problem. This means defining the area of concern, assessing

waste types and amounts, as the origins of the waste and the

accessibility to the waste. What you see in this table is an example of different

types of biowaste. In the columns you can then see the descriptor of original

generation

the amounts, the variations over the year, but what is also essential information, is

to know, how the waste type is currently being managed, if at all. If a recovery

and recycling pathway is already established, it makes little sense to

disrupt this. An example is the case of certain types of vegetable waste, from

the markets that are already sold or left to farmers for feeding livestock.

The next step in the cycle is defining the goals and objectives with the

respective sub objectives. An example is shown here in this objective tree.

This objective tree can be validated or even adapted in a participatory process.

During this process

different objectives can also be weighted, depending on the perceived

importance. This example shows some predefined sub objectives grouped under

different headers which were developed by expert consultation. There is the

issue of technical reliability, social acceptance, the aspects of environmental

pollution, of high hygiene and health protection, and finally the aspect of economic sustainability.

Then, the next step is to select the various

alternatives and assess their performance with regard to the objectives we want to achieve.

Here is the list of different biowaste treatment options as we have

heard about them in the previous modules. We can now assess their suitability

regarding all those performance criteria we had in the objective hierarchy.

Here are some examples. For instance the waste type, which is in the technical objective.

Or the availability of skilled people. Also in the technical objective.

Or the market

of the products, which is one under the economic objective. So, let me say a few

things more about this economic objective. Given our experience, we have

noticed that many municipalities feel

that making for instance compost will solve all their problems and they might even

make a lot of money. Typically this is not so without a very well-planned

distribution and marketing approach. Maybe at the end the compost is then used

as cover material at the disposal site and this would be fine and makes a lot

of sense.

The main point is that it is thought through at the onset of the planning.

This aspect of economic sustainability not only necessitates a good

understanding of the costs but also of the expected revenues. So, the potential

value of the product being made from biowaste,

be it gas, protein or soil amendment. In biowaste management, it is in fact this

aspect, which is currently most difficult to assess, as the databases for making

such estimations is quite weak. We, at Sandec, are putting a lot of effort in

trying to quantify treatment costs for the different options or we could also

say production costs for that specific product that we make from biowaste.

If you have such information from your specific context, please post it to the

forum and we will compile it and use it for our reports and even future lessons.

When assessing the alternatives, we come up with scores on how they perform

towards certain objectives. It is important to discuss this performance of

alternatives to look at scores and discuss trade-offs. Then, we might find a

consensus of the best practicable alternative. This then needs

a detailed feasibility assessment. Detailed, because we start defining

scale, we start defining location and even the logistics around it.

All our experience from biowaste management shows that is best to have a pure

biowaste stream. This ensures high-quality product and, of course, minimizes costs of

sorting. Sometimes it is best to start with easy waste. Waste which is not

contaminated by none-degradable

fractions, like waste from vegetable markets or pre-consumer waste

or waste from food processing industries or restaurants. If we want to

target household waste, it is crucial that we first mobilize and incentivize waste

segregation at the household level. So, in summary, strategic planning of biowaste

management includes the process of assessing alternatives in biowaste

management, deciding on the objectives that we want to achieve, assessing the

different waste types and the source and validating the performance of the

alternatives versus the objectives. And one key realization is that segregation

is really a key step for all future biowaste management. Thank you for listening.

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