INVESTIGATION TO CHECK THE FEASIBILITY OF COMPOSTING FOR SMALL CITIES IN DEVELOPING WORLD: A CASE STUDY OF TAXILA CITY
Naeem Ejaz*, Daulat Khan**, Usman Ali Naeem*, Muhammad Ali Shamim*, Usman Ghani* and Muhammad Fiaz Tahir*
ABSTRACT
The case study presented herein investigates the composition of solid communal waste from a small city in a developing world and investigates the feasibility of using composting waste treatment. Taxila, a small city in Rawalpindi District, is selected as a focal area for this study and to start with the prevalent major environmental problems resulting from poor solid waste management were investigated. In the next stage of investigation, focal area was further subdivided into three neighbourhoods while considering the population and living standards of dwellers, with these zones named as poor, average, and rich. A total of fifty, thirty and fifteen sampling sites are selected from each of these zones respectively. Solid waste samples are collected from the selected sites for a week on daily basis, which are then analyzed to find their composition and are recorded accordingly for each zone. The analyses of collected samples indicated that almost 60-70% of generated communal waste from all three zones is organic in nature and that the composting option for such communal waste could be a more sustainable and economical solution when compared to sanitary land filling. The research findings indicated that biodegradable communal solid waste composition in small cities of developing world is suitable for composting that could help to minimize the harmful environmental impacts on life from open dumping and sanitary land filling of municipal wastes.
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December 2012
Vol 31 No 2 (2012)
