What’s Solid Waste Management?

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Solid waste management is a polite term for waste management. For as long as humans have lived in settled communities, solid waste, or garbage, has been a problem, and modern societies generate far more solid waste than early humans ever did. Daily life in industrialized nations can generate several pounds (kilograms) of solid waste per consumer, not just directly in the home, but indirectly in the factories that produce goods purchased by consumers. Solid waste management is a system for managing all this garbage and includes municipal waste collection, recycling programs, landfills and incineration.

To the great benefit of archeology, the first methods of waste management consisted of digging holes and dumping garbage. This has created a record of the kind of life people lived, showing things like what people ate, the materials used to make cutlery, and other interesting glimpses into historical daily life. As human cities began to become more concentrated, however, dealing with garbage became a serious problem. Homes that didn’t have room to bury trash threw it out into the streets, making a walk to the corner store an unpleasant prospect. In response, many cities began organizing municipal garbage collection, in the form of rag-and-bones men who would buy useful garbage from people and recycle it, or garbage collection crews who would dispose of unusable garbage.

For most industrialized nations today, solid waste management is a multi-billion dollar business that is also crucial to survival. Garbage collection agencies remove tons of trash annually and sort it for recycling or final disposal. Most cities require citizens to pay for garbage collection, while rural areas have landfills and recycling facilities where citizens can take their garbage. The ultimate goal is a reduction in the amount of waste that clog the streets and pollute the environment, whether it is disposed of or recycled into something useful. Solid waste management is also focused on developing environmentally friendly methods of waste management; for example, solid waste is no longer dumped into the oceans or unlined pits.

There are different types of solid waste that need to be treated. The first is recyclable waste, objects that are useful but no longer desired. To handle such assets, facilities must be built to recycle these items, which include scrap metal, glass, cans, paper, plastic, wood and similar materials. Another category is toxic waste, waste that could potentially contaminate the environment, which means it must be handled with care. This category includes electronic waste, a growing problem in many industrialized nations. Then there’s the green waste, like compost and garden waste. People with land can compost their own green waste, and many cities collect it separately from real trash, the last category, so that green waste can be composted and returned to the earth.

Most solid waste is collected in bins that vary in size, from household garbage bins to industrial bins, which are filled by individuals or businesses. Solid waste collection trucks move through the streets at regular times to collect these bins. Waste is also collected by street sweeping agencies, voluntary cleaning organizations, and consumers who take their waste directly to the solid waste management company. Once solid waste is collected, it is routed to a recycling facility, waste facility capable of handling toxic waste, composting center, or disposed of. Many companies maintain large landfills for this purpose, while others incinerate their own waste, using the energy generated by the incinerator to run a recycling plant or feed energy back into the power grid.

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