Status of Household Solid Waste Management and Associated Factors in a Slum Community in Kampala, Uganda

Factors influencing willingness to pay for improved solid waste collection services among households in urban cities in Uganda: empirical evidence from Lira City

Waste management in Lira City, Uganda faces significant challenges, particularly in the area of waste collection. Pollution and health risks from uncollected waste are rampant, posing serious threats to human health and the environment. This persistent problem demands urgent attention and effective solutions to improve waste collection and safeguard the well-being of the community and the natural surroundings. This study aimed to assess households' willingness to pay for improved waste collection services, examine their waste management practices, and identify influencing factors. We employed a multistage sampling technique to randomly select 585 household heads and conducted key informant interviews with city officials and private waste collectors. Data analysis was conducted with STATA 17 and results showed that 48.12% of households were willing to pay an average of UGX 3012 ($0.84) per month for better services. Factors including education level, occupation, distance to waste collection sites, and environmental awareness significantly influenced this willingness. The study highlights a significant gap in public awareness and understanding of efficient solid waste management practices and concludes that enhancing public awareness is crucial for improving environmental health and safety in Lira City.

Revealing influencing factors on global waste distribution via deep-learning based dumpsite detection from satellite imagery

With the advancement of global civilisation, monitoring and managing dumpsites have become essential parts of environmental governance in various countries. Dumpsite locations are difficult to obtain in a timely manner by local government agencies and environmental groups. The World Bank shows that governments need to spend massive labour and economic costs to collect illegal dumpsites to implement management. Here we show that applying novel deep convolutional networks to high-resolution satellite images can provide an effective, efficient, and low-cost method to detect dumpsites. In sampled areas of 28 cities around the world, our model detects nearly 1000 dumpsites that appeared around 2021. This approach reduces the investigation time by more than 96.8% compared with the manual method. With this novel and powerful methodology, it is now capable of analysing the relationship between dumpsites and various social attributes on a global scale, temporally and spatially.

The Status of Household Solid Waste Management and its Associated Factors in Fiche Town, North Shewa Zone, Ethiopia

BACKGROUND

Poor solid waste management is a major public health and environmental concern in developing countries like Ethiopia. This study aimed to assess the status of household solid waste management and associated factors in Fiche town.

METHODS

A community-based cross-sectional study was conducted among 236 residents of Fiche town from January to March 2022. Both questionnaire and field observation was used to collect data from households in the town. Data were first checked manually for completeness, then coded and entered into SPSS version 20, then descriptive statistics such as frequency and percentage were done. Multivariate logistic regression analysis was done to assess the potential predictors of the outcome variable (P < .05).

RESULT

In the present study, 185 (78.4%), of residents uses improper solid waste management practices. Multivariable logistic regression analysis revealed that knowledge of reduce, reuse and recycle (3R) (adjusted odds ratio [AOR] = 6.61; 95% confidence interval [CI] 2.94, 14.87), access to door to door waste collection (AOR = 3.91; 95% CI 2.03, 7.51), treating waste as a resource (AOR = 3.06; 95% CI 1.47, 6.36) and knowledge about the rule and regulations of solid waste management (AOR = 6.49; 95% CI 3.09, 13.61) were found to be significantly associated with waste management practices.

CONCLUSION

Therefore, there is a need to raise awareness about solid waste management at the community level using different pieces of training. In addition, the city municipality needs to strengthen door to door waste collection services.

Characteristics of municipal fresh solid wastes from the selected large urban centres in Uganda: Implication for re-use and soil amendment strategies

In Uganda, the municipal solid wastes are generally a menace to the environment, ranging from indiscriminate dumping, open burning, and landfills, which would be utilized to augment agricultural fields through organic manure. The National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) of Uganda, however from 2009 to 2012 initiated and implemented a Clean Development Mechanism project. This project was established and conducted in nine urban centers with the key objective of reducing methane and other environmental nuisances while generating compost manure. The in-coming fresh municipal wastes at composting facilities were sorted into six categories; i) wood and wood products, ii) food and food wastes, iii) textiles, iv) garden, yard and park wastes, v) paper and pulp, and vi) glass, plastics, and metals. These were laboratory analyzed based on standard procedures, characterized and investigated for the pH, total organic carbon (TOC), total nitrogen (TN), phosphorus (P), potassium (K), calcium (Ca), and magnesium (Mg) (g kg^-1). Statistical analyses were performed based on One-Way ANOVA, implemented in the SPSS program. The results indicate that the municipal fresh solid wastes were mainly dominated by biodegradable organic matter; garden, yard, and park wastes (49%), food and food wastes (43.2%), and the other wastes falling below 5.4%. Overall, the pH was 7.7 ± 0.02, TOC 318.2 ± 2.90, TN 12.1 ± 0.10, C/N 26.7 ± 0.20, P 4.4 ± 0.04, K 35.0 ± 0.49, Ca 38.9 ± 0.51, and Mg 5.8 ± 0.09. The concentration of the fresh wastes and macro-nutrients varied per municipality and were congruent with the economic activities and population lifestyles. We detected the effect of season/month on the concentration of wastes which corresponded with the various agronomical activities. The results from this study suggest that the notion of composting is potentially a viable organic waste management strategy in the country which can ultimately generate sufficient organic manure for agricultural input and thus enhanced carbon sequestration.Implications: In this study, we characterized the in-coming fresh municipal solid wastes and investigated the pH, total organic carbon (TOC), total nitrogen (TN), phosphorus (P), potassium (K), calcium (Ca), and magnesium (Mg) (g kg^-1). We found that the municipal fresh solid wastes were mainly dominated by biodegradable organic matter (>90%). The results from this study suggest the notion of composting to be potentially a viable organic waste management strategy in Uganda which can ultimately generate sufficient organic manure for agricultural input. This is typically vital for enhancing carbon sequestration towards minimizing greenhouse gas emissions.