Sustainable Financing for Municipal Solid Waste Management

Business Financing Accounting Banking Concept, businessman doing

Waste management is a growing concern for the world because of the increasing waste generation. Municipal waste is regulated from the traditional method to high technology solutions that depend on mostly countries’ development. Too many solutions are available for the operations, but the importance is to reach sustainable finance. 

As it is already known, municipal solid waste is managed by the government and requires a smart financing system. Nevertheless, this management is not only the concern of the government but also:

  • The municipalities
  • Private companies
  • Local citizens

There are many reasons for this complexity. Ineffective municipal waste management can lead to economic disaster by increasing waste management-related costs, such as:

Moreover, the report for waste management stated that waste generation and its amount are predicted to reach 2.2 billion tonnes by 2025 due to rapid population growth and industrialization. It is evident that this increasing waste generation will be a load for the government, municipalities, private companies, and local citizens in terms of the economy.

Although the waste type and the management system differ from country to country, the solutions and economic challenges are similar. The problems behind the economic situation are mostly inefficient waste management and the lack of technological innovations. Let’s list the problematic parts that a government may face during its operations and why they do not reach sustainability finance.

Lack of Tracking of The Operation History

There is a very simple process we use in our daily lives: understanding the past and determining our new actions according to it. Waste management companies can do the same methodology. For instance, record-keeping is beneficial to understand citizen municipal solid waste generation behavior. In the traditional waste management method, the record of the waste collection is not kept, leading to inefficient operations and a lack of information about when the case comes to prediction.

Unnecessarily waste collection causes fuel consumption to increase and extra costs for the resource. We can add extra labor and time to this resource. Unless the record is kept, the bins are located randomly or with insufficient information, and even they are not allocated. Even the addition of new waste bins is a possible solution used by the municipalities, which is unnecessary. Likewise, this can be included in the use of necessary resources, which will hinder financial waste management.

Inefficient Waste Collection and The Logistic Imperfections

Unless companies or governments use the perfect transportation and collection of waste, it is hard to reach well-worked financing. Unfortunately, both low, lower-mid, upper-mid, and high-income companies spend too much money on waste collection, and its ratio is reached 25%-50% of their budget. For a municipality, paying such expenses only for waste collection and transportation may cause it to be unable to improve other businesses. Well, what is the source of this problem? It can be inefficient traditional waste management.

Waste collection operations are widespread, as a door-to-door collection of municipal residents’ waste is daily or bi-daily. Plus, as the waste is collected, drivers mainly select a way to return to the landfill or recycling center. However, both problems are due to inadequate operational optimization since traditional waste management does not have any optimization of route or waste collection frequency. 

It seems that the misdirection of resources is the root cause of the financial problem. Plus the economic problem, none of these are sustainable. Let’s look at the benefits of an investment in smart waste management.

Smart Waste Management

Smart waste management consists of both hardware and software, which is supported by IoT, unlike traditional waste management. The significant opportunity for the reduction in unnecessary collection and fuel consumption. As it is operated by predefined and predicted waste generation behavior and drivers follow an already optimized path, fuel consumption automatically decreases. For a waste bin that is less than half full, there is no need to change and extend the route, spend labor and time, right? Smart waste management does just that.

Besides operationally sustainable financing, since most of them can service communication with drivers or citizens with an application, even the call center cost decreases at an impossibly good rate. Since only the necessary bins will be collected in this system, fewer people can be found at the waste collection stage compared to the traditional method, and these crews can be directed to other areas and more benefits can be obtained. 

We should use technology and its benefits because only can we direct the right resources by reaching more sustainable methods. Although it is generally thought that the investment to be made in hi-tech waste management is excessive, it saves you unnecessary operational and administrative costs and makes improvements that you will observe in prolonged or even short promises. 

If you need to achieve better financing methods, and direct your sources correctly, take advantage of Evreka’s solutions!

eBooks

Download most recent e-books from our library now.

Download E-Books
Explore More Article