Life Cycle Assessment problems and prospects in Bangladesh: a case study of healthcare waste management of Chittagong Metropolitan city

Currently, municipal solid waste (MSW) management has become a challenge to the urban authorities, wherein healthcare waste (HCW) is a major contributor of hazardous wastes fraction and redoubling problems, especially in developing countries. Lately, to estimate and evaluate environmental and health impacts from MSW treatment and disposal program, life cycle assessment (LCA) has stood most popular tool. But its application is restricted in HCW sector hereto; therefore, it was planned to conduct such a study in Bangladesh. Hence, the study was conducted to explore current problems and prospects for implementing an LCA study on HCW in Chittagong Metropolitan City (CMC). Primary data was collected by surveying two separate predesigned questionnaires for healthcare entities (HCEs) and HCW management organizations. Besides, three scenarios were developed focusing existing HCW management in CMC and one proposed. Later, all the calculated values of each scenario were put in LCA database. Finally, data was analyzed by adopting Simapro 7 software to calculate global warming (GW), human toxicity (HT) and terrestrial ecotoxicity (TET) potential for HCW management system. This study revealed that conducting a preliminary LCA study in Bangladesh based on current scenarios is very tough task. There are manifold problems to conduct LCA study on HCW sector viz. dissimilarity amidst different authorities & HCEs, defective implementation of law, no data record, unwillingness to share data, and lack of database. Contrary, there is a good prospect to conduct LCA study if appropriate implementation of law and technical support can be ensured. Further, analyzing four scenarios, it was found that source segregation, disinfection, and incineration with energy recovery by involving private initiative in HCW handling and disposal can minimize GW, HT, and TET impacts. According to field observation and data analysis, unfair and illegal disposal of HCW in CMC area is triggering environmental pollution including health hazards. Inversely, introducing proper HCW handling and disposal guidelines can be reduced such adverse impacts. Finally, this study will facilitate new researchers by providing baseline data to conduct more details LCA on HCW

Status of Household Solid Waste and People’s Perception on its Management at Sitakunda Upazila, Chittagong

Urban household solid waste (HSW) is well-known, but has little knowledge about the rural areas and sub-cities. The quest of the study was to investigate current HSW management system and people’s attitude towards it’s at Sitakunda Upazila. The study was conducted through a semi-structured questionnaire survey by interviewing 150 households from 3 different socioeconomic groups. The results showed that on an average each household generated 1.26 kg/day wastes which stands at 0.24 kg/person/day in the study area. However, HSW generation is positively correlated with family size (rxy=0.991, p˂0.05), average age of family members (rxy=0.455, p˂0.01), and monthly earnings (rxy=0.999, p˂0.01) of the households. Amidst the various categories of wastes, vegetable and food wastes (VFWs) were identified as the highest value 68.4%. In contrast, 24.6% of the generated wastes were recyclable and 75.4% non-recyclable; 82.1% organic and 17.9% inorganic. A large percentage of sampled households opined that present HSW management involves merely partial collection that is also irregular in urban areas but absent in rural areas. Unfair HSW collection was noticed by 58.7% and partial source segregation is also rare 14%. Besides, 42.7% people were found to dispose their daily generated wastes by open dumping and 25.3% nearby lagoon. A large number of people were dissatisfied 68% and only 6.7% were satisfied with the existing HSW management system. In addition, most of the people encountered bad odor problems by 28.7% and wastes spread on roadside by 38%. Significant quantity of recyclable wastes was noticed to collect from households by hawkers/scraps in the study area and very few household were found to use VFWs with cow-dung to generate biogas.INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENT Volume-6, Issue-1, Dec-Feb 2016/17, page: 58-75</p