Industrial Solid Waste Management in a Developing Country Governorate and the Opportunities for the Application of Cleaner Production Principles.

Abstract

Hebron is an industrial governorate south of Palestine where the lack of studies ends up to inexistent evaluation of its environmental status. Understanding the status of industrial solid waste management (SWM) largely contributes to the determination of the opportunities and the appropriate roadmap for the application of cleaner production principles.In this chapter, we report the results of an extended research-constructed survey conducted in Hebron both at municipal level and industrial level. Primarily the municipal level research was aimed at identifying the current SWM practices. Then the industrial level research was aimed to collect data on both the applied SWM practices in local industries and record the generated quantities of ISW. Towards the development, updating and implementation of a legislative framework, which will support an integrated SWM in the local industrial area, the stakeholders are highly encouraged to develop an incentive system for industries to reduce and recycle the generated ISW. This need clearly emerges from the current research results: Only 21 out of 91 factories treat SW before final disposal; 83.33% of them recycle the waste in situ or in collaboration with local recycling stakeholders; 51.65% of the investigated industries produce a mixture of process and nonprocess ISW, the average rate of nonprocess ISW is 23.22 kg/ day; 8.4% of factories always separate process ISW from nonprocess ISW; 85.7% of factories do not separate their ISW into specific components. Only 13.6% of factories reuse and 16.5% recycle ISW; 77.3% of the recyclable materials are used as secondary raw materials, and 22.7% of them use the separated ISW as secondary raw materials in production, both implementing the fundamental 3Rs principle.