Towards waste management in higher education institute: The case of architecture department (CIC-New Cairo)

Abstract

Waste Management represents a significant challenge Higher Educational Institutes (HEIs) face as they strive to achieve their sustainability goals. The fundamental concern lies in the impact of waste on health and socioeconomics. Consequently, there is a pressing need to adopt effective waste management techniques. The issue becomes more complex within HEIs, which generate substantial types of waste. The amount of waste produced by HEIs and diverse campus activities exacerbates the problem. Compounding this challenge is the lack of proper waste segregation and disposal methods. The research aims to define the specific checkpoints for waste management that should be considered to apply the waste management plan in HEIs by developing a workflow of waste management in HEIs. Any HEI can create a closed-loop system for effective waste management by following these workflow processes. To be able to test the efficiency of the workflow, the research employs a questionnaire via question-pro targeted at all CIC-architecture department users, followed by creating a four weeks project in the environmental control course by applying the process of the workflow of waste management in HEIs which finds that the most waste type for architecture engineering is papers which resulted in developing the waste management methods to be applied on most of the curriculum's courses then ended by suggesting another method related to cooperating with non-profit recycling firms. Finally, the results confirm the research objectives which shows that the existence of waste management workflow helps the stakeholder to develop a waste management plan suitable to the activities of each college.