Investigating householders’ attitudes toward recycling, household waste separation and disposal of wastes in Jeddah city, Saudi Arabia
Abstract
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is going through a period of increasing urbanization, development and population growth resulting in a significant increase in municipal solid waste (MSW) generation. This waste is disposed of in landfill or incineration without treatment or resource recovery, meaning valuable recyclable resources are lost which ultimately have negative impacts on both human health and the environment. Solid waste management is therefore a challenge, especially in the major cities in the country that house the majority of the population, such as Jeddah the second largest city in the Kingdom. However, the current solid waste management system in Jeddah has an integrated waste treatment facility (Asla landfill) in which waste (household and commercial) is disposed of through recycling and energy recovery. Therefore, Jeddah Municipality has started a project of sorting waste at source. This research aims to investigated the awareness of household heads of the importance of the environment, identify current behaviors towards recycling, and predict the future intention of sorting and recycling behavior if it becomes mandatory as expected through the Saudi Government.
Based on this, a questionnaire was conducted with 88 household heads in Jeddah city. The analyzed data indicated that the studied community possesses knowledge related to waste management, positive environmental attitude, and believes that it is possible to predict future positive behavior in the direction of sorting and recycling. However, the results showed that the methods and practices of sorting and recycling of household heads need improvement as most households practice recycling, but with a relatively small percentage of waste material, and this is likely due to the lack of sorting containers in the area and the lack of education on how to sort waste from the source. Statistical analysis demonstrated that environmental knowledge and sorting practices were influenced by demographic factors including age, gender and education.
In conclusion, the strengths of Jeddah Municipality is that it has an integrated waste treatment facility (Asla) to recover, recycle or disposal of municipal solid waste. However, there remains an urgent need to provide citizens access and understanding the importance of recycling. The municipality needs to provide sorting bins and educate the populace through advertising campaigns that emphasis a positive promise to change behavior in the future to be more active. The results of this study are valuable for future researchers in the context of developing municipal solid waste management, as the research has also provided valuable information that the Jeddah municipality could use to develop more effective measures for household waste management.