Proposal and Test of an Assessment Method for Municipal Solid Waste Management Systems

This paper proposed a methodology for the quality assessment of a municipal solid waste management system to help the decision-making process and improve the services and the system itself. This method considers four dimensions (strategy, collection and transportation, sorting and treatment, final disposal), with 202 analysis items based on information to be obtained mainly in loco and to be transformed in one single quality index, from 0 to 1. First, this method was applied in 20 cities of Brazil and the municipality that showed the lowest index, 0.07, also presented the lowest Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, second-lowest population, and the third lower Human Development Index (HDI). The city with the highest indicator (0.53) presented the larger population, the highest GDP per capita, and the highest HDI. Later, one municipality used the methodology for five years, which helped the administrators make decisions that made the index improve from an initial value of 0.24 to 0.55 after five years. The proposed evaluation model proved to be efficient in diagnosing and to help the decision-makers, aiming for the improvement of a solid waste management index after the improvement of the related services for the population.