Waste refers to any liquid/solid material for which there is no further use and it has been rejected or replaced. Material is said to be waste when people lose sight of its value. Waste can be non-flowing materials (solid wastes) or flowing materials (wastewaters). Solid wastes can be categorized as municipal solid waste (Household garbage, rubbish, demolished debris, residential ashes, commercial refuse, institutional refuse, construction debris, street cleaning refuse or street sweeping, dead animals (e.g. dogs), abandoned vehicles and sanitation residues etc), industrial solid waste (examples are packaging materials, spoiled metal, spent processing chemicals, raw material wastes, plastic and textiles, fuel-burning residuals etc) and hazardous solid waste (all wastes that have hazardous properties such as toxicity, inflammability and corrosivity or ecotoxicity). Again major sources of wastewater can be categorized as urban wastewater, industrial wastewater and agricultural wastewater.

Proper management of wastes needs someone to understand the category and components of wastes s/he is dealing with. These mainly depend on the sources of wastes and sometimes it may require you to use separate storage and collection containers to achieve proper management process. For example in breweries plant, solid wastes’ storage sites /containers can be designed separately depending on wastes categories generated (See figure “a” and “b”).

Figure a: Photos showing different storage site for solid wastes at a certain breweries industry

Figure b: Photos showing different Storage containers used for different categories of solid wastes at a certain breweries industry

Management of wastewater/liquid wastes and solid wastes can be described in general sense as shown in the respectively figures 1 and 2 below. However this is may vary slightly depending on the nature or composition of wastes

Figure 2: Elements of solid waste management

Figure 1:

@AFRICAN RURAL PRESS IN ACTION: