Waste is an unwanted or unusable items, remains, or byproduct, or household garbage.
Waste management is a problem for most countries around the world because of the increasing volume of waste material and the paucity of places to deposit it. Waste has been recognized as one of the major problems confronting governments and city planners in Nigeria, thereby posing a serious threat to environmental quality and human health.
Waste generation scenario in Nigeria has been of great concern. Of the different categories of wastes being generated, solid wastes had posed a problem beyond the scope of various solid waste management systems in Nigeria. In rural or urban areas in Nigeria, the volume of solid waste being generated continues to increase coupled with lack of infrastructure for adequate waste treatment and indiscriminate disposal of waste.
Solid waste impact
Improperly managed solid waste poses a risk to human health and the environment. Uncontrolled dumping and improper waste handling causes a variety of problems, including contaminating water, attracting insects and rodents, and increasing flooding due to blocked drainage canals or gullies. In addition, it may result in safety hazards from fires or explosions.
Preventive measures
Source reduction, recycling and waste transformation methods are widely used to manage solid waste, however in all of these methods there is always residual matter even after the recovery process to dispose. The necessity of getting rid of these waste yields in an economic and environmentally approach called landfilling. As sanitary landfilling is an inevitable part of municipal solid waste management system, appropriate selection of landfill site is important in order to minimize environmental damage as well as to prevent negative impact on the public health, thereby improving the overall sustainability associated with the life cycle of the landfill.
The best way of reducing waste such as polluting bags, should be discharge in packaging items from shops, don’t buy things you don’t need, Avoid disposable products, designed to be thrown away and don’t buy over packaged goods, buy things in returnable containers and return the containers once empty.
Recycle method could be used. Recycle means creating new thing from used items. From the solid waste (solid waste about 20 to 30% of the material can be recycled. Such materials include:
- Papercanbere-pulped and reprocess into recycle paper, cardboard and any other paper product.
- Broken glasses can be crushed, re-melted and made into containers
- Some form of plastics can be re-melted and fabricated into carpet fibers or cloth
- Food waste and yard waste can be composted to produce fertilizers and soil conditioners.
