Abstract
Decisions related to waste management were affected to contain the advance of the new coronavirus pandemic. Different measures have been adopted between countries around the world. This study aims to assess changes in decision-making on solid waste management in Brazil and Portugal during the COVID-19 pandemic, considering the socioeconomic differences and the context of waste management in each country before the health crisis. A literature review was carried out on scientific bases, PubMed, Google Scholar and Web of Science. Differences were noted in decisions and guidelines for good practices in waste management, with measures being observed in a decentralized manner in Brazil, differently from what was observed in Portugal. In this way, the understanding of urban waste management during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil becomes complex, in addition to the territorial extension and the diverse social composition, due to the decentralization of decision-making, while Portugal centralizes decisions related to waste management and has a smaller population and territorial extension.
Highlights
Human activities were changed by the measures to reduce the spread of the new coronavirus Sars-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, during the pandemic that began in late 2019, in a specific way in each region of the world
Given the previous studies that were conducted by the research group on waste management comparison between the two countries (Mol et al, 2021), and given the moment of the COVID-19 pandemic that affected all countries in different ways, this article aims to study, carrying a literature review, the solid waste management decision-making in Brazil and Portugal during the COVID-19 pandemic, in view of the existing socioeconomic and demographic differences, and the strategy for approach to combating the health crisis between the two given countries
The survey was conducted between January and May 2021, including information that investigated the implications of the pandemic on the solid waste management in studied countries, seeking the particular context observed in each region with similar demographic characteristics, according to the profile of countries reported by the World Bank's data
Summary
Human activities were changed by the measures to reduce the spread of the new coronavirus Sars-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, during the pandemic that began in late 2019, in a specific way in each region of the world. This was because of each country's condition, employment situation, social composition (Benítes et al, 2020), as well as other demographic factors such as age distribution (Dowd et al, 2020), that affects the decision-making process. The number of cases varies from region to region; in early August 2021, Brazil recorded 9,573.86 confirmed cases of COVID-19 per 100,000 inhabitants and 267.59 deaths due to COVID-19 per 100,000 inhabitants (WHO, 2021a). Changes in the composition of household waste generated were noted, as reported by Aldaco et al (2020), which indicated a 12% increase in generation rate of organic waste in Spain during the lockdown period. Aldaco et al (2020) suggested that results can be deduced to the European reality and other regions with similar levels of food security
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