Solid waste should be deemed as opportunity instead of crisis
Commissioner Rawalpindi vows to replicate IRRC model in Rawalpindi district Background: Municipalities in the low-income, developing countries spend a major proportion of their municipal revenues on Solid Waste Management (SWM). Yet service levels remain low while most disposals are deemed as unsafe. The situation is likely to worsen due to continuing population growth and urbanization in these countries. Like other developing countries, Pakistan too faces serious environmental problems. A large proportion of the municipal waste is either burned, dumped or buried illicitly on vacant land in many towns and even major cities, causing significant environmental damage and threatening human health. Worse, there are no SWM systems in place to deal with potentially hazardous waste; systems dealing with medical waste are particularly inadequate. Therefore solutions are needed urgently. All major cities, be it Islamabad, Lahore, Rawalpindi, Karachi, Quetta and Peshawar are facing enormous challenges in tackling the problem of urban waste.…
Course on solid waste management to be introduced at AIOU
Islamabad: Dr Akhtar Hameed Khan Memorial Trust (AHKMT) has expressed its willingness to introduce a course on waste management in collaboration with the Department of Environmental Sciences at the Allama Iqbal Open University (AIOU)’s Islamabad campus, says a press release. AHKMT CEO Sumaira Gul in her concluding remarks at the certificate distribution ceremony of a three-day training workshop on the subject held in Islamabad said that the trust has been working on solid waste and sanitation models not only in the downtrodden areas across the country. “This training workshop is an orientation session, after this, the students will be able to get training for six months at the Integrated Resource Recovery Centre (IRRC). AHKMT’s Integrated Resource Recovery Centers established across the country in Sakrand, Islamabad and Mardan manage the waste generated in these cities in a decentralized manner with a focus on source separation of waste through community participation,” she…