Improving Municipal Solid Waste Collection Services in Developing Countries: A Case of Bharatpur Metropolitan City, Nepal

Abstract

Municipal solid waste management is one of the major challenges that cities in developing countries are facing. Although waste collection services are critical to build a smart city, the focus of both scholarship and action/activism has been more on the utilization of waste than on collection. We devised a choice experiment to elicit the preferences of municipal residents with regard to the various attributes of solid waste collection services in the Bharatpur Metropolitan City of Nepal. The study showed that households identify waste collection frequency, timing of door-to-door waste collection services, and cleanliness of the streets as the critical elements of municipal waste collection that affect their welfare and willingness to pay. While almost all households (95%) were participating in the waste collection service in the study area, more than half (53%) expressed dissatisfaction with the existing service. Women were the main actors engaged in waste collection and disposal at household level. The results of the choice analysis suggest that households prefer a designated waste collection time with waste collection bins placed at regular intervals on the streets for use by pedestrians who often throw garbage on the streets in the absence of bins. For these improvements, households were willing to pay an additional service fee of 10–28% on top of what they were already paying. The study also finds that municipal waste collection can be improved through the involvement of Tole Lane Committees in designing the timing and frequency of the service and by introducing a system of progressive tariffs based on the number of storeys per house.

Smart City Governance in Developing Countries: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Appendix A provides more detailed information about the 56 studies including country/initiative studied, method of the study and the aims/objectives of the study. Geographical locations (country/continent) of the included studies by descending order (based on the number of studies identified) India [28,[32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][67][68][69][70]79] China [45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53]71,76,80] Indonesia [54][55][56][57] Brazil [3,58,72] Malaysia [59][60][61] Vietnam [62,73] Mexico [63] Turkey [78] Egypt [81] Romania [64] Nepal [65] ...…”

“…Despite advocating for the smart city agenda, some developing countries are still held back by the lack of investment in basic infrastructure. Basic urban infrastructure, such as having proper water drainage and sewerage systems, are requisite for any city to thrive, but some cities still face a shortfall in providing these services [37,43,65]. In India, smart city adoption is held back by the lack of provision and maintenance in basic infrastructure, which result in uneven development and lowquality infrastructure in some cities, particularly in the slum areas [43].…”

“…In addition, the mounting population pressure is making infrastructure such as underground sewerage and water drainage systems unsustainable [37]. Under-provision of door-to-door garbage collection services and inefficient municipal solid waste management systems in some cities in South Asia are also hampering the effort of smart city development, as governments still struggle to meet the basic public service needs of their citizens [37,65].…”

“…One of the most challenging of the aspects governments have to grapple with in smart city development in developing countries is the various environmental issues that could ensue from the massive development that smart cities have brought [34,42,43,65,74,80,84]. These issues tend to result from the sudden ecological stress imposed on the environment due to the large migration from rural to urban areas to take advantage of the opportunities arising from smart city development.…”

“…These issues tend to result from the sudden ecological stress imposed on the environment due to the large migration from rural to urban areas to take advantage of the opportunities arising from smart city development. This phenomenon has resulted in many unplanned settlements in the cities and brings about congestion and pollution, besides other forms of resource allocation issues [42,65,74,84]. One of the most significant environmental concerns due to the sudden increase in urban population is the ecological pressure exerted on the environment from over-extraction of groundwater resources.…”