A community-based approach on solid waste management for historical townships of Kathmandu valley, Nepal

<p>NB Maharjan, A Khanal and S R Basnet</p>

A community-based approach on solid waste management for historical townships of Kathmandu valley, Nepal

NB Maharjan, A Khanal and S R Basnet

Blue Waste to Value, Lal durbar, Ward 1, Kathmandu Metropolitan City, Kathmandu, Nepal

: Expert Opin Environ Biol

Abstract

Proper solid waste management plays vital role in the entire people and living ecosystem. In Nepal, the Solid Waste Management Act 2011 has clearly routed for decentralised solid waste management practices and mandated Local Authority (LA) to adopt Integrated Solid Waste Management (ISWM). LA is full responsible to derive plans and execution for their city’s generated solid waste. Environment Friendly, Local Governance Framework 2013 reiterate about the solid waste management practices should start from the source with prevention practices and ultimately reduce the waste sent to the landfill. However, LAs are often lack the capacity, understanding, and enforcement for effective SWM, they ruled out and dedicate either social or commercial entities to manage it within. With minimal SWM awareness leading to socio-economic and environmental problems, alternative management approaches may be effective. This paper deliberate the best models of implementation based on community by educating them for waste prevention, proper source segregation, and timely collection and take them to reprocessing, so as the maximum amount of the end product goes to recycling, upcycling and repurposed. This has been managed with the public private partnership (PPP) adopting the polluter’s pay principle model at Shankharapur Municipality, east of Kathmandu valley, Nepal. It comprises of series of community intervention, creating demands of services so as to realise them, better understanding of waste prevention, reduction, reuse and recycling activities in solid waste management sector. This has led to quench the thrust of the community to make proper clean green community in place and support the municipality to bring them on board as responsible citizen. The clean city campaign is designed to have the proper clean-up in segregated collecting styles that resulted the team to have efficient management of the solid waste. The project’s first year mobilized a team of students and collected data from a community needs assessment, waste generation analyses, and workshops, which we utilized to create a sustainable action plan for the remainder of the program. The action plan provides the program with goals and objectives in order to affect SWM change in core areas of Shankharapur city and its peripheral environments. First-year project and observational findings demonstrated that community-based programs are effective tools for addressing SWM challenges but, to be sustainable, need to co-exist with a supportive and committed LA.