waste flow: a fundamental element fot the sustainability of resource recovery from municipal solid wastes

Abstract

Resource recovery from Municipal Solid Wastes –MSW has been gained strenght in Colombia with the implementation Solid Waste Management Plants –SWMP. The waste flow allows establishing relations between quantities and characteristics of solid wastes with sources of generation and alternatives for resource recovery and contributes to PMRS sustainability. This study applied the waste flow tool in a typical SWMP of a Colombian municipality and the results show that the residential sector is the main source of MSW and also that the most significant proportion of the solid wastes generated are High Degradation Organic Wastes - HDOW. Seventy percent of HDOW are disposed in landfills because of lack of segregation at source. HDOW neither are conditioned for their transformation and the SWMP do not have a good performance. The highest quantities of recyclable materials were generated in the residential sector; but these materials have lower quality than those generated by commercial and institutional sectors. Forty three of recyclable materials are recovered in their sources by scavengers. To improve the SWMP performance it is important to regulate the interaction between public waste service and scavengers.