Excerpt
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
1. Urban Management Problem of Hawassa City
1.1 Improper Waste Management
1.2 Inadequate Pure Water Supply
1.3 Unemployment
2. Literature Review
2.1 Waste Management
2.1.1 Definition of Waste and Waste Management
2.1.2 The Impact of Poor Waste Management
2.1.3 How Wastes should be Managed?
2.1.4 Responsible Bodies for Waste Management
2.1.5 Challenges of Sustainable Urban Waste Management
2.2 Pure Water Supply
2.2.1 Provision of Water for Urban Centers
2.2.2 Challenges for Pure Water Supply in Urban Centers
2.3 Unemployment
2.3.1 Urbanization and Unemployment
2.3.2 Cause, Effect and Solution of Urban Unemployment
3. Strategies to Address the Identified Urban Management Problems
3.1 Goal
3.2 Objectives
3.3 Strategies and Specific Activities
3.3.1 Designing an integrated urban management system
3.3.2 Designing an integrated urban waste management system
3.4 Stakeholders
References
Introduction
Hawassa, the capital of the Southern Nations Nationalities and Peoples Region (SNNPR), is one of the newly emerging cities in Ethiopia. Located on the shores of Lake Hawassa in the Great Rift Valley, Hawassa has a mean annual rainfall of about 950 mm and temperature of 20°C. The estimated population of Hawassa for 2015 was 351,469, with an annual population growth rate of just over 4% (The Ethiopian Central Statistical Agency (CSA, 2015) as cited in Scott, Ross and Hawkins (2016:11). This city is divided into 8 sub cities, and each city has different physical and population size.
Hawassa is registering high population growth mainly due to rural-urban as well as town to town migrations. This population growth resulted in the horizontal expansion of the city and inadequacies of various services that are essential for the society. And these also became bottlenecks for good governance through create urban management problems in the city. Those problems hamper the socio-economic development of the city. Those urban management problems include increment of urban waste generation and inadequacy of proper waste collection and disposal services, lack of pure water supply and insufficiency of job opportunities. The brief discussion of problems, literature review, possible strategies and specific activities to address problems as well as potential stakeholders are presented in the proceeding discussion.
1. Urban Management Problem of Hawassa City
As articulated in the city’s Socio Economic Profile that had been compiled in 2006 E.C the City’s population is growing very fast, and much of the population growth has been the result of internal migration. This internal migration happens due to the city development especially the expansion of educational and other facilities that is required for better life. This in turn resulted in widening of the city’s boundaries and inadequacies in the provision of various services such as health services, education, water supply and so on. The major urban problems faced by Hawassa city are the improper management of waste materials, inadequacies of pure water supply and unemployment.
1.1 Improper Waste Management
Improper waste management is one of the urban management problems of Hawassa city. Different type of solid wastes are generated from different sector i.e., from households, government and non-government institutions, commercial sectors, industries, hospitals and the like. However, those waste materials lack proper management (collection and storage). Different types of solid wastes are scattered in different areas like residential areas, market areas, along the edge/side of streets and around the shore or cost of the Lake Hawassa (For instance the part of Hawassa Lake located at Haiq Dar sub city is highly polluted by different kind of solid and liquid wastes). This situation has diminished the cleanness and beauty of the city and brought environmental pollutions especially land and water pollution. This in turn has negative significance or consequence on public and environmental health.
1.2 Inadequate Pure Water Supply
The other urban management problem of Hawassa city is inadequate pure water supply. As stated in the Socio-Economic Profile of Hawassa (2006 E.C) even if Hawassa city has shown a spectacular progress in safe/pure water provision, still it is not adequate. The existing water provision capacity of the city does not meet with the highly growing population which in turn creates increasing demand for pure water. That means the demand and supply of pure water are not at the equilibrium, and this brought shortage. And this became a headache for urban managers of Hawassa city.
1.3 Unemployment
Unemployment is the other urban management problem in Hawassa city. The population of Hawassa City is characterized by young population. Around 65% of the people are under 25 years of age, and only about 5.5% of the population is over 50 years of age (Socio-Economic Profile, 2006 E.C). This indicates as there is high percentage of productive population.
Considerable number youths from productive group of the society get educated and graduated from various public and private educational institutions at TVET and higher education level. But the capacity of public and private organizations to employ those graduates is not as such higher. Taking this limited capacity of government and private institutions to create a vast employment opportunities, the City Administration of Hawassa is encouraging young people to get organized and begin small scale businesses and providing some sort of finance that will enable those youngsters to get start and make their own capital. The city government is doing this in order to reduce the rate of youth unemployment. However, unemployment is still a problem.
2. Literature Review
In this part different literature regarding the above urban management problems/issues are reviewed and discussed.
2.1 Waste Management
2.1.1 Definition of Waste and Waste Management
“Waste is an unwanted or undesired material or substance. It may consist of the unwanted materials left over from a manufacturing process (industrial, commercial, mining or agricultural operations,) or from community and household activities. The material may be discarded or accumulated, stored, or treated (physically, chemically, or biologically), prior to being discarded or recycled. It is also used to describe something we use inefficiently or inappropriately” (Green by Nature, 2009: online).
Waste is “Unwanted material left over from a production process, or output which has no marketable value” (Business Dictionary, online).
On the other hand, Wikipedia defined waste management or waste disposal as the activities and actions required to manage waste from its beginning to its final removal. It stated that waste management includes the collection, transport, handling and removal of waste together with monitoring and regulation, and it incorporates the legal and regulatory framework that relates to waste management including guidance on recycling.
In the same way, Conserve Energy Future (Online) defined waste management as the process of handling solid wastes and providing variety of solutions for recycling items that don’t belong to rubbish or garbage. It said that waste management is about how garbage can be used as a valuable resource, and waste management is something that each and every household and business owner in the world needs. Waste management disposes of the products and substances that you have use in a safe and efficient manner.
2.1.2 The Impact of Poor Waste Management
As stated in Open Wash (online) poor waste management has a great effect on health. It dictated that poor waste management open the door for various pathogens like bacteria, viruses, protozoa and parasitic worms cause many diseases that are spread by direct contact with faces or indirectly via contaminated food and soil. It also discussed that those poorly managed wastes causes for the formation and spread out of vectors (organisms that do not cause diseases themselves, but carry or transmit disease-causing agents) like mosquitoes, lice, ticks, fleas and rats.
It also dictated as the improper sanitation have a significant impact on children’s health and education since children are frequently get ill as a result of parasites and other infections, which leads to poor school attendance and performance. This, in turn, makes them not to better able to find jobs that demand higher-level skills on finishing school in the long run. And this also create economic disadvantage. In the same way Mattingly (1995:11) argued as abandoned wastes block drains and create a breeding medium for disease vectors.
Improper waste disposal also have a great negative impact on the environment. As claimed by Open WASH (online) poor sanitation and waste management directly affect local environment, and human practices can also make its consequences even broader. It argued as improved sanitation has obvious local environmental benefits in such a way that defecation only takes place in properly constructed latrines, areas of land are not contaminated with faeces and watercourses no longer act as sewers. This in turn allows plant life, fish and other aquatic organisms to flourish. Improving waste management improves the local environment and also benefits the national and even the global environment. Good waste management means less litter of waste disposal sites in the streets and in the neighborhood. It also reduces the smell in the streets from decomposing wastes. And the reverse is true for bad waste management.
Ill managed waste has a massive consequence on health, local and global environment, and economy; improperly managed waste usually results in down-stream costs higher than what it would have cost to manage the waste properly in the first place. The global nature of municipal solid wastes includes its contribution to greenhouse gases emissions, e.g. the methane from the organic fraction of the waste stream, and the increasingly global linkages of products, urban practices, and the recycling industry (Hoornweg and Bhada-Tata, 2012). They also argued as solid waste is one of the most malicious local pollutants, and uncollected solid waste is usually the leading contributor to local flooding and air and water pollution. United States Environmental Protection Agency (online) stated that poor waste handling may result in safety hazards from fires and explosions.
2.1.3 How Wastes should be Managed?
“Municipal wastes are not well managed in developing countries, as cities and municipalities cannot cope with the accelerated pace of waste production. Waste collection rates are often lower than 70 per cent in low-income countries. More than 50 per cent of the collected waste is often disposed of through uncontrolled landfilling and about 15 per cent is processed through unsafe and informal recycling” (Shanghai Manual, pp 1).
Tchobanoglous and Kreith (2002) solid waste management is a complex process since it encompasses many technologies and disciplines including technologies associated with the control of generation, handling, storage, collection, transfer, transportation, processing, and disposal of solid wastes. They argued that all of these processes have to be carried out within existing legal and social guidelines that protect the public health and the environment and are aesthetically and economically acceptable. For the disposal process to be responsive to public attitudes, the disciplines that must be considered include administrative, financial, legal, architectural, planning, and engineering functions. All these disciplines must communicate and interact with each other in a positive interdisciplinary relationship for an integrated solid waste management plan to be successful. They defined Integrated waste management (IWM) the selection and application of suitable techniques, technologies, and management programs to achieve specific waste management objectives and goals.
Tchobanoglous and Kreith identified waste management options that could also be options for the implementation of integrated waste management. These options are the following.
i. Source Reduction
Source reduction focuses on reducing the volume and/or toxicity of generated waste. Source reduction includes the switch to reusable products and packaging, the most familiar example being returnable bottles. The time to consider source reduction is at the product or process design phase.
They explained that source reduction can be practiced by everybody. Consumers can participate by buying less or using products more efficiently. The public sector (government entities at all levels: local, state, and federal) and the private sector can also be more efficient consumers. They can reevaluate procedures which needlessly distribute paper (multiple copies of documents can be cut back), initiate procedures which require the purchase of products with longer life spans, and cut down on the purchase of disposable products. The private sector can redesign its manufacturing processes and redesign products by increasing their durability, substituting less toxic materials, or increasing product effectiveness so as to reduce the amount of waste generated in manufacturing.
Tchobanoglous and Kreith asserted that source reduction can best be encouraged through c ost internalization (pricing the service). Through this way the cost that will be incurred for waste management i.e., cost for pickup and transport, site and construction, administrative and salary, and environmental controls and monitoring will be calculated. And these costs must be considered whether the product is ultimately managed in a landfill, combustion, recycling, or composting facility.
ii. Recycling and Composting
According to Tchobanoglous and Kreith recycling is the most surely supposed and attainable waste management practice, and recycling will return raw materials to market by separating reusable products from the rest of the municipal waste stream. They recognized as recycling has many advantages such as saving precious finite resources; dwindling the need for mining of virgin materials, which lowers the environmental impact for mining and processing; and reducing the amount of energy consumed, helping out to stretch landfill capacity; and improving the efficiency and ash quality of incinerators and composting facilities by removing noncombustible materials, such as metals and glass.
As stated by those authors, in addition to the above benefits, recycling will bring cultural change among the society. It will require moving beyond a mere willingness to collect discarded materials for recycling, and it will call for consumers to purchase recyclable products and products made with recycled content. It will also need businesses to utilize secondary materials in product manufacturing and to design new products for easy disassembly and separation of component materials.
In addition, Friends of the Earth for the Planet of the People (pp 1) explained that composting is a best way of managing solid waste with a high organic content (i.e. biodegradable waste) such as garden waste, kitchen waste, park waste, and even scrap paper and cardboard. It said that 60% of municipal solid waste can be composted.
iii. Combustion (Waste-to-Energy)
Combustion is the third wasted management option stated by Tchobanoglous G., and Kreith F., (2002). According to them combustion facilities are attractive since they reduce the volume of waste dramatically, up to nine fold. Those facilities also recover useful energy, either in the form of steam or in the form of electricity. Depending on the economics of energy in the region, this can be anywhere from profitable to unjustified. Volume reduction alone can make the high capital cost of incinerators attractive when landfill space is at a premium, or when the landfill is distant from the point of generation. For many major metropolitan areas, new landfills must be located increasingly far away from the center of the population. Moreover, incinerator bottom ash has promise for reuse as a building material.
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