What is gonna happen with this after I throw it away? Do these pictures look familiar? Piles of garbage in neighborhoods and streets, or smelly, burning and polluting waste disposal-sites. Unfortunately, this is a frequent situation in low andd middle-income countries, especially in towns and urban centers. Do you want to understand the complex interaction between stakeholders, technical solutions and governments? And how this can contribute to improve municipal solid waste management? Then, this course is for you. Sandec is partnering with EPFL to bring you a series of online courses. This is the Sandec webpage, for more information on the series Sanitation, Water and Solid Waste for Development. This course is dedicated to municipal solid waste management. Hi, hola, bonjour! I'm Chris Zurbrügg. I'm a research scientist at Eawag, at the department Sandec. I specialize in solid waste management in low and middle income countries. I will conduct this course together with me colleague Imanol Zabaleta. In this course, we will cover the two dimensions of solid waste management. The first invovles understanding the physical components of a municipal solid waste management service. We will discuss aspects of the whole chain, starting from generation of waste to collection of waste, treatment and disposal. The second dimension analyzes the governace aspects; these include the roles and responsabilities of stakeholders, the financing mechanisms, legislation and policies, as well as socio-cultural aspects. When analyzing the stakeholders, we will present examples of non governamental organizations, the informal sector, private enterprises, as well as different government agencies or even the role of external funding agencies. Throughout the course, we will be covering issues around recycling and creating value from waste. We shall put a special focus on treatment options for biowaste because in low and middle income countries most often, more than half of the municipal waste consists of biowaste, in other words, waste which is biodegradable. We will look at more conventional approaches, such as composting, but also, at vermicomposting, or anaerobic digestion. What is the science behind these processes? What kind of challenges do such projects face? What are they a success or why did they fail? Did you know that there are actually other innovative approaches which are just in the phase of research, or just recently being implemented to treat this biowaste? For instance, producing protein from biowaste. We will cover these and more issues together with guess lectures, who will present experiences from the field, for instance Félix Schmidt, from CSD Consulting, and Sanjay Gupta, a waste management expert, working for SKAT Consulting. How is municipal solid waste managed in your neighborhood and city? What do you observe? What do you contribute? Why don't you share this with us? We want you to actively participate in our course by sharing your experience and get involved in solid waste management. We look forward to working with you! You are just a click away from registering.
