Implications of COVID-19 pandemic on waste management practices: Challenges, opportunities, and strategies towards sustainability

ABSTRACT

The effect of COVID-19 is changing the ways in which we live, starting with one day then onto the next. While national and local regulatory interventions are widely centered on securing human wellbeing and economies, effective and sustainable waste management approaches are of paramount importance to limit the possible secondary environmental impacts in the longer run. In addition, considering the trend of the last 20 years, the COVID-19 episode is the third reported pandemic this century, following SARS and MERS in 2003 and 2012, individually. Therefore, similar pandemics with potentially greater magnitude and graver impacts are more likely to occur in the future based on the earlier analyses of disease outbreaks. It is within this context and more broadly to address overwhelmed waste management system exposed during the pandemic, the chapter aims to present (i) the status of global solid waste generation and changes in its dynamics brought upon by COVID-19 crisis due to the fluctuated resource consumption, (ii) pandemic induced consumer’s behavioral changes resulting in panic purchasing of groceries, food stockpiling, over-buying, inappropriate storage, and overcooking which ultimately ended up as households waste, (iii) challenges and limitations faced by waste management authorities in handling the abrupt increase in volume and type of the solid waste generated globally, and, (iv) opportunities and strategies that gravely enables in obtaining resilient and sustainable waste management practices to overcome similar challenges in future pandemics. © 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.