Um olhar para a gestão de resíduos sólidos urbanos a partir de indicadores de sustentabilidade

Abstract

Solid waste management has been shown to be a major challenge for local governments given the high operational costs and increasing amounts of waste generated. Inadequate waste management, as well as the damage to the environment and to public health, gives rise to great expense for its mitigation. There is a need to search for solutions which focus on, among other things, the economic efficiency for a healthy environment. This can be attained through sustainable development, shown to be an alternative model of development to the present one. To guarantee that sustainability is the aim of a given activity, it is necessary to establish goals and to periodically assess the system to trace opportunities and correct possible errors. Such assessment can be done via the use of sustainability indicators, a tool that has been consolidated in the search for sustainability in several spheres, including business and public, from data collection to generate information. In this work, based on an ample literature review, systems of indicators were identified and an analysis of the indicators that deal with solid waste management relating them to the dimensions of sustainability and to those principles of sustainability specific to the management of solid waste. The indicator systems were divided into two groups: sets of sustainability indicators that deal with solid waste, and sets of sustainability indicators specific for evaluating solid waste management. In the former, the environmental dimension is highlighted, dealt with by all of the systems in at least one of the sustainability principles related mainly to indicators connected to recycling and garbage collection. In the second group, the indicators are distributed in a balanced way between the dimensions, although the principle of work and income generation and that of promoting sustainable standards of production and consumption were covered by fewer indicators as opposed to the other principles.