The effectiveness of solid waste management practices :

Abstract

Solid waste management practices especially storage, collection and disposal are increasingly becoming a big problem in many municipalities in Uganda. This is attributed to poor storage, collection and disposal facilities, the delayed solid waste collection due to few garbage transportation trucks and indiscriminate dumping of solid wastes. The study aimed at establishing the effectiveness of solid waste management practices in Soroti municipality. The study was conducted in Soroti municipality the major objective to establish the fundamental causes of poor solid waste management and to seek the local people's opinions on how the problem would be handled. The objectives were to find out what methods are used to store, collect and dispose of different solid wastes generated in Soroti municipality, to establish reasons for delayed removal of solid wastes from storage and collection sites and to establish reasons for indiscriminate dumping of solid wastes in Soroti municipality. Self-administered questionnaires personal interviews and purposive sampling were used to obtain data on the different solid waste management practices. The data was coded, entered in excel, filtered and then exported to SPSS software for analysis because it was considered to be user friendly as compared to other soft wares. Most of the residents in Soroti municipality store solid waste by use of plastic bins mainly provided by the residents themselves. Solid waste collection is by manual lifting because of few garbage transportation trucks which has led to delayed removal of solid wastes from collection sites especially in Eastern division and solid waste disposal is by burning mainly because disposal sites are far away from residential areas. The main reasons for scattered rubbish in Soroti municipality are mainly residents being unbothered, wind blowing rubbish, heavy rain down pours which sends rubbish to trenches, and carelessness across all education levels.