Review of Municipal Solid Waste Management: A Case Study of Nairobi, Kenya

Abstract

Solid waste management (SWM) is a major public health and environmental concern in urban areas of many developing countries. Nairobi’s solid waste situation, which could be taken to generally represent Kenya’s status, is largely characterized by low coverage of solid waste collection, pollution from uncontrolled dumping of waste, inefficient public services, unregulated and uncoordinated private sector and lack of key solid waste management infrastructure. Solid waste generated on daily basis is 4,016 tonnes as predicted by Allison (2010). The collection rate is as low as 33% (JICA, 2010) which leaves about 2,690 tonnes uncollected (almost equal to the total daily waste generation as predicted by JICA (1998)). Apart from Nairobi City Council (NCC), the body that has the primary responsibility for the provision and regulation of SWM services in the city, other actors have come into play such as private companies and community based organizations among others. The models of operation of these actors are not well understood. Effective coordination among these actors is also absent and regulation of the private companies by the city council is only beginning to emerge. According to Mwangi, 2007, analysis of total costs incurred by various actors and amount of waste collected per month showed that CBOs had the least fixed cost of operation as compared to private companies. Further, the CBOs had the lowest cost per tonne of waste collected as compared to other operators who showed almost twice this amount. These suggest that solid waste management is very expensive and CBOs are the cheapest operators of solid waste. Therefore, CBOs should be left as the waste operators in the low income areas where the residents are unable to pay a lot of money for waste management due to their low operating costs. Due to their relatively high operation costs, the private companies are more suited to operate in the high income areas and CBD where the residents or the owners of building are able to afford for the services. However, private enterprises are primarily interested in earning a return on their investment and may not be efficient due to the complexity of their operations outlay especially when proper coordination and SWM models are lacking.