Assessing the impact of household waste disposal practices on water quality of Womba River. A case study from Sawla Town, Ethiopia

Master's Thesis from the year 2017 in the subject Environmental Sciences, Arba Minch University, language: English, abstract: The general objective of the study was assessing the impacts of household’s poor waste disposal problem on the water quality of Womba River in Sawla town. A waste refers to any material or product that has been considered useless by the owner and needs to be discarded or has been discarded. Solid waste is any organic or inorganic materials generated from various human activities which have been considered unwanted or useless therefore disposed treated or untreated. On the other hand, the term household’s solid waste management has been defined differently by different writers and Authors. For instance, defined it as all activities that seek to minimize the environmental, aesthetic and human health impacts of households solid waste. A much more comprehensive definition of has been provided by, which stated that solid waste management is a discipline associated with the control of generation, storage, collection , transfer and transporting, processing and disposal of it. So, it is a manner in accordance to the best principle of public health, economics, engineering, conservation, aesthetics, and other environmental conservations responsive to public health. Inherent in this definition, solid waste management is a processes which includes waste generation, storage, collection, transfer and transport, processing and disposal of wastes in accordance to the principles of household’s solid waste management. The rapid urbanization and growth of urban population that has been taking place during the 20th century virtually transformed the world in to communities of cities and towns. These developments imposing challenges on environment in which most of them have to be addressed at international level. Among those environmental challenges, municipal waste management is a critical one. This is because as long as humans have been living in settled communities, solid waste generation has been an unavoidable in both developed and developing nations.