Sustainability performance assessment of municipal solid waste management utilising aggregated indicators approach

Abstract

There is a need for effective and sustainable municipal solid waste (MSW) management system to be implemented in Malaysia, especially in the urban areas. Indicators have often been chosen as a tool to evaluate the performances of the current MSW management system in Malaysia. From the literature reviewed, no index was found to be similar with the one being proposed by this study. This study was conducted to produce a set of indicators that evaluate the MSW management system throughout the entire life cycle. The development of these indicators involved intensive literature reviews, discussion meetings with stakeholders, and workshop organisation with solid waste management experts. Weightage were assigned to the established indicators by using analytical hierarchy process, which were then incorporated into a performance index, known as municipal solid waste management performance index (MSWMPI). Data collection were done at five cities, which were Muar, Rembau, Putrajaya, Langkawi and Pekan. As a result, a total of nine indicators under four criteria, C1 (MSW Generation and Segregation), C2 (MSW Collection and Transportation), C3 (MSW Treatment) and C4 (MSW Disposal), were finalised. The weightage for the four criteria were found to be 32.17% for C1, 19.82% for C2, 25.41% for C3, and 22.60% for C4. Among the five cities, Pekan had the highest MSWMPI, with a value of 74.85 and was rated as performing good. On the other hand, the MSW management system in Muar had the lowest MSWMPI, with a value of 51.23. Langkawi had an MSWMPI of 59.89, which was followed behind closely by Rembau (58.12) and finally, Putrajaya had the MSWMPI value of 52.43. City profiling among the respective cities had also been done to identify the hotspots in the MSW management system. It was found that most cities performing well in C1 and C2, would not perform greatly in C3 and C4, and vice versa.