COVID-19 and waste management policy practices in India: a systematic review

Amit Kumar Das (), Uday Chatterjee () and Jenia Mukherjee ()
Additional contact information
Amit Kumar Das: Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur
Uday Chatterjee: Bhatter College, Dantan
Jenia Mukherjee: Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur

Asia-Pacific Journal of Regional Science, 2023, vol. 7, issue 4, No 13, 1393 pages

Abstract: Abstract The second most populous country in the world, India, is severely facing challenges in managing increased amounts of solid and bio-medical wastes leading to associated physical and health hazards. The Government of India (GoI) has launched and modified different policies regarding the handling and management of solid, bio-medical and plastic wastes since independence to deal with the changing waste scenario of the country. However, with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in the country since early 2020, inadequacies of municipal solid waste management (MSWM), bio-medical waste management (BMWM), and plastic waste management policies have occurred with personal protective equipment (PPE) kits, such as facemasks, face shields, gloves, gowns, sanitizer bottles, and remnants of packaging goods from online shopping, putting the waste economy and ecology under further pressure. This article provides a systematic review of literature on the Indian SWM practices during COVID-19 within the larger context of the existing Indian MSWM, BMWM, and plastic waste management policies. Finally, we suggest ways by which the waste scenario can be tackled during cycles of crises including outbreaks of pandemics in the future. We advocate for involving multiple stakeholders like solid-waste management (SWM) officials, local community members, i.e., citizens, ragpickers, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) along with the deployment of different disposal methods, such as biomethanation, pyrolysis, etc. in designing effective and efficient policies and actions. We believe that these sets of recommendations have scalability, especially in managing COVID-19-Associated Waste (CAW) in the global South. Graphical abstract

Keywords: Pandemic; Bio-medical waste management; Municipal solid-waste management; Policy; India (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s41685-023-00309-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:apjors:v:7:y:2023:i:4:d:10.1007_s41685-023-00309-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer ... cience/journal/41685

DOI: 10.1007/s41685-023-00309-3

Access Statistics for this article

Asia-Pacific Journal of Regional Science is currently edited by Yoshiro Higano

More articles in Asia-Pacific Journal of Regional Science from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().