Solid waste management

The meaning of solid waste management is the supervised handling of the solid waste materials from the generated source through the recovery process and disposal. The following data will give the importance of the requirement of a proper Solid Waste Management. i.e.  The totally generated waste in India is 62 million tons. In that plastic waste is 5.6 million tons, biomedical waste is for n 1.7 million tons, hazard waste is about 7.9 million tons and the e-waste is 15 lakhs tons.

The solid waste management includes mainly four steps.
Storage, Collection, Transportation and Disposal.
Storage
First of all wastes are stored in waste bins, drums or boxes which is placed in many different places in the cities or housing areas.
Collection
Stored wastes are collected at door to door by the rag pickers who generally collect usable materials.
Transportation
These collected wastes are transported to the disposal or treatment site by using specially equipped trucks and many workers with the special masks, gloves and other dress materials for health safety.
Disposal
It is the fundamental function of solid waste management. It refers to placing the solid waste in its ultimate resting places and then further treatment processes.
The different methods adopted for solid waste disposal and treatment are - open dumping, landfilling, sanitary landfilling, ocean dumping, incineration, pyrolysis, composting and vermicomposting.