Problems of municipal waste management in Bangladesh: An inquiry into its nature

Waste management is the most important function and takes up the major portion of resources of the two large city corporations in Bangladesh: Dhaka and Chittagong. The quantity of waste generated daily in these two cities is only 350 g/ capita, and the major constituents of wastes are organic and compostable materials. The residents are involved in many reusing and recycling activities thus the overall disposable waste contains only around 2% papers and metals. Still there are some major waste management problems in these cities caused by some physical planning issues, governmental systems and policies, and administrative and managerial procedures. The major problem of waste management, however, is the people's attitudes and behaviour. The cities, due to their traditional and outdated waste management practices, have created a big distance between the waste producers (the residents) and the cleaners (the city government). Now these cities face the problems resulting from this distance. The paper discusses these problems and analyses them in order to understand the situation better.