Household waste retains an absolute majority of municipal
solid waste (MSW) sources to which most costs of municipal
waste management are allocated.
MSW constitutes
approximately 10 percent of the waste produced, generating
approximately 50 million kilograms of MSW in Iran annually.
Solid waste management
(SWM), therefore, assumes a prominent role in municipal
services.
Keeping the view of serious health problems associated with population growth, rapid development
and urbanization, providing a suitable waste management
is perceived a challenging task in many communities. Developing
countries suffer greatly from these problems, where garbage collection
operations do not occur at all or not enough.
The best and most economical method
for dealing with these setbacks is to minimize the generation of
waste.
Recycling
of previously used materials has also been found to alleviate deleterious
impacts of increasing amount of waste.
Although, it has been reported that
more than half of all solid waste is recyclable, it is interesting to
note that a substantial amount of recyclable waste is dumped into
the garbage.
Hence, people play a
prominent part in SWM elements such as waste generation, source
separation, storage, collection, recycling and disposal.