Municipal solid waste refers to everyday trash discarded by the public. It includes materials like food waste, recyclables, yard waste, and various packaging. Waste management involves collection, sorting, transport, and disposal or recovery of materials. Methods of managing municipal solid waste include recycling, composting, landfilling, and converting waste to energy through incineration. Proper management reduces health and environmental impacts.

1. Municipal solid
waste
Muhammad Fahad Ansari 12IEEM14

2. What is it?
• Municipal solid waste (MSW) or simply Solid Waste,
commonly known as trash or garbage, refuse or
rubbish is a waste type consisting of everyday items
that are discard by the public.

3. What does it include?
• The composition of municipal waste varies greatly
from country to country and changes significantly
with time.
• In countries which have a developed recycling
culture, the waste stream consists mainly of
intractable wastes such as plastic film, and un-
recyclable packaging.
• At the start of the 20th century, the majority of
domestic waste in the UK consisted of coal ash from
open fires

4. What does it include?
• In developed countries without significant recycling
it predominantly includes food wastes, yard wastes,
containers and product packaging, and other
miscellaneous inorganic wastes from residential,
commercial, institutional, and industrial sources.
• Examples of inorganic wastes are appliances,
newspapers, clothing, food scraps, boxes,
disposable tableware, office and classroom paper,
furniture, wood pallets, rubber tires, and cafeteria
wastes. Municipal solid waste does not include
industrial wastes, agricultural wastes, and sewage
sludge

5. What does it include?
• The collection is performed by the municipality
within a given area.
• They are in either solid or semi-solid form.
• The term residual waste relates to waste left from
household sources containing materials that have
not been separated out or sent for reprocessing.

6. What are its type?
• Following are the different types of wastes.
o Biodegradable waste: food and kitchen waste,
green waste, paper (can also be recycled).
o Recyclable material: paper, glass, bottles, cans,
metals, certain plastics ,fabrics, clothes, batteries
etc.
o Inert waste: construction and demolition waste,
dirt, rocks, debris.

7. What are its type?
o Electrical and electronic waste (WEEE) -
electrical appliances, TVs, , computers, screens,
etc.
o Composite wastes: waste clothing, Tetra Packs,
waste plastics such as toys.
o Domestic hazardous waste (also called
"household hazardous waste") & toxic waste:
medication, , paints, chemicals, light bulbs,
fluorescent tubes, spray cans, fertilizer and
pesticide containers,, shoe polish.

8. How is it managed?
• Waste management is the collection, transport,
processing or disposal, managing and monitoring of
waste materials.
• The term usually relates to materials produced by
human activity, and the process is generally
undertaken to reduce their effect on health, the
environment or aesthetics.

9. How is it managed?
• Waste management is a distinct practice from
resource recovery which focuses on delaying the
rate of consumption of natural resources.
• The management of wastes treats all materials as a
single class, whether solid, liquid, gaseous or
radioactive substances, and tried to reduce the
harmful environmental impacts of each through
different methods.

10. How is it managed?
• Waste management practices differ for developed
and developing nations, for urban and rural areas,
and for residential and industrial producers.
• Management for non-hazardous waste residential
and institutional waste in metropolitan areas is
usually the responsibility of local government
authorities, while management for non-hazardous
commercial and industrial waste is usually the
responsibility of the generator.

11. How does its management work?
• The municipal solid waste management has four
components: recycling, composting, landfilling, and
waste-to-energy via incineration.
• The primary steps are generation, collection, sorting
and separation, transfer, and disposal.
• Activities in which materials are identified as no
longer being of value and are either thrown out or
gathered together for disposal.

12. How does its management work?
• Collection
o The functional element of collection includes not
only the gathering of solid waste and recyclable
materials, but also the transport of these
materials, after collection, to the location where
the collection vehicle is emptied. This location
may be a materials processing facility, a transfer
station or a landfill disposal site.

13. How does its management work?
• Waste handling and separation, storage and
processing at the source
o Waste handling and separation involves activities
associated with waste management until the
waste is placed in storage containers for
collection. Handling also encompasses the
movement of loaded containers to the point of
collection. Separating different types of waste
components is an important step in the handling
and storage of solid waste at the source.

14. How does its management work?
• Separation and processing and transformation of
solid wastes
o The types of means and facilities that are now
used for the recovery of waste materials that
have been separated at the source include
curbside collection, drop off and buy back
centers. The separation and processing of wastes
that have been separated at the source and the
separation of commingled wastes usually occur
at a materials recovery facility, transfer stations,
combustion facilities and disposal sites.

15. How does its management work?
• Transfer and transport
o This element involves two main steps. First, the
waste is transferred from a smaller collection
vehicle to larger transport equipment. The waste
is then transported, usually over long distances,
to a processing or disposal site.

16. How does its management work?
• Disposal
o Today, the disposal of wastes by land filling or land
spreading is the ultimate fate of all solid wastes,
whether they are residential wastes collected and
transported directly to a landfill site, residual materials
from materials recovery facilities (MRFs), residue from
the combustion of solid waste, compost, or other
substances from various solid waste processing
facilities. A modern sanitary landfill is not a dump; it is
an engineered facility used for disposing of solid
wastes on land without creating nuisances or hazards
to public health or safety, such as the breeding of
insects and the contamination of ground water.

17. How does its management work?
• Energy generation
o Municipal solid waste can be used to generate
energy. Several technologies have been
developed that make the processing of MSW for
energy generation cleaner and more
economical than ever before, including landfill
gas capture, combustion, pyrolysis, gasification,
and plasma arc gasification.

18. How does its management work?
• Energy generation
o While older waste incineration plants emitted
high levels of pollutants, recent regulatory
changes and new technologies have
significantly reduced this concern.

19. How does its management work?
• Energy generation
o United States Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) regulations in 1995 and 2000 under the
Clean Air Act have succeeded in reducing
emissions of dioxins from waste-to-energy
facilities by more than 99 percent below 1990
levels, while mercury emissions have been by
over 90 percent. The EPA noted these
improvements in 2003, citing waste-to-energy as
a power source “with less environmental impact
than almost any other source of electricity.”