BACKGROUND Waste poses a threat to public health and the environment if it is not stored, collected, and disposed of properly. The perception of waste as an unwanted material with no intrinsic value has dominated attitudes towards disposal. This study investigates the domestic waste practices, waste disposal, and perceptions about waste and health in an urban community. METHODS The study util...

The paper presents the current situation of the waste management system of the megacity Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, and the options for waste and land recycling in a low income country. Generally, there is a large potential for circular economy in the city as the main proportion of the waste flows are recyclables. Due to the missing selective collection system, this potential is not used in the ful...

This Special Issue provides several different perspectives on the complex issue of packaging waste recycling. It comprises a diverse and rich set of contributions with insights from very different disciplines that range from economics to engineering. All types of “costs and benefits” are addressed in this collection of articles. In addition to the economic and strictly financial impacts of sele...

This paper reports the environmental results, integrated with those arising from mass and energy balances, of a research project on the comparative analysis of strategies for material and energy recovery from waste, funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research. The project, involving the cooperation of five University research groups, was devoted to the optimisation of m...

Background and Purpose: Improper wastewater and solid waste management in rural areas could be a risk to human health and environment pollution. One percent of Iran’s rural area is connected to the wastewater collection network. Solid waste management in rural areas of Iran is mainly consisted uncontrolled dumping and open burning. The aim of this study is prioritization of wa...

In developing country like India E-waste management is being reckoned as a challenging task due to unplanned discarding of E-waste along with municipal solid waste. A “systematic & scientific” trade chain of E-waste is essential to manage the present scenario both in terms of environmental protection and health perspective. The prevalence of informal E-waste handling in India has put forward se...

The aim of this paper is to present and compare alternative hierarchical formulations for the periodic vehicle routing problem applied to solid waste collection. The solution of this problem is a one-week plan of daily routes for the transportation of mixed solid waste from containers to disposal facilities, taking into consideration the frequency of collection of each container within the plan...