Knowledge and Practice regarding the Domestic Waste Management among Households of selected rural community, Mangaluru

Abstract

The house in which we and our family live needs to be clean and hygienic for the good health of our family. Home is the first place from where waste management can be initiated. But the practice of basic concepts waste disposal are often neglected. More than 90% of waste in India is dumped in an unsatisfactory manner. The rapid growing population and urbanization, proliferation of slums is all contributing to the generation of increased volume of garbage. There are millions of tons of waste is generated as a result of the ordinary day to day use of a domestic premises. As per the research study Bangalore generates around 1500-2000 tons of solid waste daily. Average solid waste generation in Mangalore city is 226tons/day. The present investigation was aimed to assess the knowledge and practice of households regarding domestic waste management, and to find out an association between knowledge and practice scores with selected demographic variables among households. The non-experimental typical descriptive research design was used in the study and non-probability purposive sampling technique was used to draw the sample. The data was collected from 80 households using the structured knowledge questionnaire and practice checklist. The collected data was analysed by using descriptive and inferential statistics. The study findings revealed that on assessing the levels of knowledge, Majority of the subjects (52.5%) had only moderate knowledge with total mean and SD of 10.05±3.990 and majority of the subjects had (73.8%) moderate practice score on waste management with total mean and SD of 18.09± 5.413. The knowledge and practice scores in relation to selected demographic variables were compared and tested statistically using chi- square test and found that there is no significant association between knowledge and practice. The overall findings of the study suggest that there is a need for educating the households regarding the proper domestic waste management. All households must take a key role in housekeeping and disposing domestic waste.