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Urban organic waste management in Karachi, Pakistan
conference contribution
posted on 2018-02-12, 15:09 authored by Noman Ahmed, Chris ZurbruggInadequate collection and disposal of waste poses a
serious health risk to the population and is an obvious
cause of environmental degradation in most cities of the
developing world. Mixed municipal solid waste is dumped
either indiscriminately in the neighbourhood or, if collected
by a waste collection service, disposed of in uncontrolled
dumpsites. The organic fraction of this waste, often
contributing to more than 50% of the total waste amount,
threatens the health of residents as the indiscriminate waste
dumps attract rodents and other disease carrying vectors.
Organic waste is also responsible for pollution of soil and
water bodies through leachate, and in the process of uncontrolled
anaerobic degradation it contributes to global warming
by the production of methane. A possible step in
mitigating these detrimental effects is enhancing resourcerecovering
activities of the organic waste fraction. An
obvious treatment and recovery option for organic waste is
composting. However, before strategies can be developed on
how to proceed, it is necessary to understand the existing
organic waste management practices and try to assess
current and potential markets for the converted organic
waste.
History
School
- Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering
Research Unit
- Water, Engineering and Development Centre (WEDC)
Published in
WEDC ConferenceCitation
AHMED, N. and ZURBRUGG, C., 2002. Urban organic waste management in Karachi, Pakistan. IN: Reed, B. (ed). Sustainable environmental sanitation and water services: Proceedings of the 28th WEDC International Conference, Kolkata (Calcutta), India, 18-22 November 2002, 3p.p.Publisher
© WEDC, Loughborough UniversityVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2002Notes
This is a conference paper.Other identifier
WEDC_ID:12023Language
- en
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