Municipal Solid Waste Management and Environmental Awareness: Household Survey Study on Dhamrai Municipality

Bangladesh is a developing country. With the time period of the development, the amount of waste is increasing and the effective management and legislation of this waste has become an important issue. Every year, this solid waste tends to increase; it will inevitably create a great solid waste management (SWM) burden for local administrations. Solid waste is becoming a major problem in Dhamrai Municipality. The study is to looking for the existing solid waste management practices, analyze the present waste management system and find out some basic problems related to solid waste management system in Dhamrai Municipality. This study reveals that ward 5 and ward 6 in Dhamrai Municipality represent a different scenario of solid waste management. Primary data collection includes questionnaire survey, observation survey, photographs taking, interview of the officials, etc. was made for find out an overall perception of the study area. This study finds out that almost 50% solid wastes dump on a roadside and 30% dumping in vacant land. 30% waste used to recycle process. Almost 45% wastes are responsible for environment pollution. That’s why people suffered from different kinds of diseases like fever, dysentery, malaria, skin diseases, etc. Unfortunately, the conventional disposal method employed by most local administrations is open dumping without considering health, hygiene and environmental issues. This study reviews the storage, collection, disposal, management, and recycling policies for SWM in Dhamrai Municipality. SWM is related with tangible and intangible factors namely environment, health, community, education, finance, technology, governance, policy and regulation. If these factors are addressed properly, SWM can be sustainable and can enhance governments capabilities