Integrated approach in municipal solid waste management in COVID-19 pandemic: Perspectives of a developing country like India in a global scenario

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a global emergency crisis in terms of socio-economic-environmental challenges. Such crisis has altered generation and disposal of wastes both in terms of qualitative as well as quantitative aspects and poses real challenges to the policy makers to arrive at decision to ensure sustainable management of environment. The present study tries to reflect the challenges faced by the existing waste management framework to combat huge waste generation. Developing country like India, ranks second among the COVID positive cases across world which results into an enormous hike in biomedical waste generation. Therefore, the present study has attempted to highlight and discuss all those newly generated problems in view of ongoing global pandemic with the necessity of chalking out strategies integrating different traditional, modern and newly proposed waste management strategies to tackle the deteriorating environmental problems especially in respect of generation, collection, disposition and recycling of huge amount of municipal solid wastes alongside assessing different guidelines as imposed by different Government agencies for handling of municipal solid wastes under this global crisis. Despite very limited literatures, the study has tried to emphasize the role of different existing processes as well as provide recommendations for improvement in waste management sectors in order to meet the challenges of ongoing and future crisis out of pandemic.