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- Abfallwirtschaftsplan (1) (remove)
Abstract Developing and emerging tropical Asian countries have encountered fast urban development due to the migration of farmers seeking a better life in the city. This resulted in a lack of appro-priate infrastructure and inappropriate social services in many cities. Municipal solid waste management is no exception and is in fact often placed at the bottom of the list of priorities for the cities’ appropriate urban management plans since laws and regulations must first be for-mulated and implemented. The problem of unmanaged municipal solid waste certainly leads to air pollution, disease, and to soil and water contamination. These problems in tropical climates are compounded with high temperature, high-level humidity, heavy rainfall and frequent flooding. Stagnant water and leachate from waste quickly become the breeding grounds of in-sects, rodents and bacteria, thus creating a health hazard for workers and local populations. Moreover, water and groundwater contamination may lead to serious environmental degrada-tion with direct impacts on water supplies, and in the fast degradation of agricultural products, the backbone of most tropical Asian countries. Many cities still allow or tolerate dumping of waste in uncontrolled sites, and open burning that disperses particulates that most likely contain dioxins and furans. Even with increasingly scarce land availability within or in proximity of the cities, sanitary landfill is still the most often cho-sen disposal method around Asia because of its lower cost when compared to modern treatment systems. Yet, most of these landfill sites do not have proper lining, daily covering, methane recovery devices, leachate control systems, nor do they have long-term closure and monitoring plans, which implies short and long-term hazards. Some municipalities opted for incineration, which usually entails high operation and maintenance costs because of the need for supple-mental fuel and often-inappropriate running conditions. Although tropical conditions appear to favor certain disposal systems such as composting, appropriate technology needs to be identi-fied in order to reduce operation and maintenance costs while ensuring good quality outputs; compost plants have often been closed because of poor quality products due to the high content of plastic and glass particulates in the finished product. Tropical Asian cities are now required to identify affordable and sustainable solutions for the management of their increasing amount of waste generated daily, while ensuring minimal environmental impact, social acceptance and minimal land use. The purpose of this dissertation was to develop a user-friendly decision-making tool for public administrators and government officials in tropical Asian developing and emerging cities. This tool was developed based on a list of selected decision-making issues necessary in making an informed decision. The decision-making tool is to be used by decision-makers in making a pre-liminary assessment of a most appropriate waste management and treatment system for their municipality. Tropical Asian cities must consider a number of issues when deciding on their waste management plan such as the continuously changing quantum and composition of waste associated with the increasing population and income per capita, the high humidity levels, and the often-limited financial resources. Other determinant factors include legal, political, institu-tional, social and technical issues. Furthermore, administrators must realize the importance of each stage involved in waste management, which includes waste generation, collection, trans-port, waste characteristics, disposal and treatment. To better understand the complexity of the issues involved in tropical Asian municipalities, the city of Bangkok, Thailand’s largest city and capital, was selected as a case study for the management of its 9,000 tonnes of waste gen-erated daily. Numerous interviews, meetings along with the review of documents, reports and site visits offered an inside view of the tropical city’s various decision-making issues towards its waste management plan, and examine specific problems encountered by the city’s decision-makers. The review and analysis of the decision-making issues involved in Bangkok’s waste management plan showed how the decision-making tool can be used in various Asian tropical cities. In conclusion, waste management in an emerging tropical country involves specific challenges that need to be addressed. Economical, technical and social criteria need to be fully understood as to capacitate government officials in the selection of the most appropriate urban waste man-agement system. Limited budgets, lack of public awareness and poor systems’ management often cloud decision-makers in choosing what appears to be the best solution in the short term, but more costly over the years. Weather conditions and scarcity of land in proximity of the city make waste management especially challenging. The decision-making framework offers a tool to decision-makers, as to facilitate the understanding and identification of key issues necessary in the formulation of a sustainable urban waste management plan and in the selection of a tech-nically, economically and socially acceptable integrated MSW management system. A detailed feasibility study and master plan will follow the preliminary study as to define the plant´s specifications, its location and its financing.