Modeling the household water consumption and solid waste generation in urban areas of developing countries by means of socioeconomic variables

Abstract

The paper proposes two predictive models for water consumption and solid waste generation based on socioeconomic variables. These models were developed based on socioeconomic, water consumption and solid waste generation data from Belo Horizonte and validated for the city of Porto Alegre, confirming the intrinsic correlation between per capita income and the above mentioned features. The low equivalent errors between the predicted and real values, for both cities, suggest the use of these models for other Brazilian urban regions and maybe for other cities in developing countries.