Solid Waste Inventory for Mezquital Valley, Hidalgo

Abstract

As a result of a documentary investigation, the solid waste inventory of the Mezquital Valley (VM) region was generated, which is in Hidalgo State in Mexico, and it is integrated by 28 municipalities. The main purpose was to identify the sources of waste that produce Urban Solid Waste (MSW), Special Management Waste (SHW) and Hazardous Waste (HW). For this purpose, several research articles and waste inventories developed for several cities and countries were reviewed and studied because some of them show generation indexes for each source and in some cases for each person. These indexes were applied to calculate waste for each source and sector of municipalities. The sources of reviewed documents include some government offices such as Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Geografia (INEGI), Secretaria de Agricultura y Desarrollo Rural (SADER) and the Servicio de Informacion Agroalimentaria y Pesquera (SIAP). Collected data were grouped by municipalities according to source type and waste type, which were used for representing environmental problems of Hidalgo state by hierarchy. Total solid waste generated in MV region is 5,041,445 t/year, with 92% are SHW, 7.63% are MSW and only 0.37% is for HW. A comparison of total solid waste generated in Mexico show that MV region contributes with only 1%, even when this region is one of the biggest in Hidalgo with 30% of the total population of the state. According to INEGI, in Mexico, 92% of final disposal sites are inappropriate and only 8% are landfills with appropriate disposal. For MV region, the final waste disposal is inappropriate because only 18% of its 28 municipalities deliver their waste into landfills.