How Does Waste Management Affect Our Health?

The significance of a clean environment is the stimulation of good health and good living. A good waste management system determines the wellness of those living in the area.

The environment and health are thus, not mutually exclusive. They share a common ground, one of which is waste management.

What Does It Mean to Be Clean?

The clear recipient of our activities on earth is the living things- plants, animals, and us human beings.

To be clean means to be free from dirt or any other contaminant. This is so because when contaminants gain access to our environment, they destroy the human body system’s integrity. Animals require cleanliness that is crude, raw, or free from artificial defilement. Now cleanliness to all living things represents freedom from impurities and contaminants that may cause harm or injury.

Waste Management

A proper exposition on the definition of waste management would lead us into this discourse’s substance.

Waste management is a practice that helps us master our environments to a satisfactory extent. This refers to the ability to control, to a significant degree, how the environment reacts and counteracts our activities. It presents to us ways and styles we can adopt to preserve the health of the environment and the wellbeing of the living things that thrive off the environment.

Usually, when the term waste management is used, most people inherently think of household waste only, a small piece of the pie. There are other types of waste that we should consider. It is important to note that these different types of waste also require different types of management. One cannot simply dispose of medical wastes the same way household wastes, food wastes, or industrial wastes are disposed.

The reason is that these wastes require separate management setups because while some wastes need recycling for proper efficiency, some should be incinerated.

Waste Predicament

In many parts of the world, waste management problems are usually most spotted in but not restricted to areas with poverty and high density in population. This is due to the spin-off of a densely populated place to produce high amounts of wastes that may or may not be adequately taken care of.

With the inclusion of poverty, the certainty for an improper waste management system would be incredibly high. And because of this possibility, the effects of poor waste control in that area would be visible. The proliferation would be rampant because of the lack of capacity to manage it.

In areas characterized by the above, diseases and infections of different stages would be easy to contract. Most poor and slowly developing regions of Africa have had to battle with disorders and diseases. That is because many inhabitants live in the most degrading ways, thereby making them susceptible to infections.

These people live in homes without toilets or kitchens and the absence of drainage systems. As a result, they practice all their activities outdoors, exposing themselves to horrible conditions. Due to these sad disposing habits, access to clean drinking water is limited and tainted by residents’ waste dumped into rivers.

Even at that, industries with no value for acceptable sanitary practices dispose of their toxic byproduct indiscriminately among residential areas, thereby causing harm to the people and wildlife in that location. There are several other ways our waste management styles and structures can continue to have ill effects on the people and the environment, some known and others unknown.

Among the refugee camps across the world, little news is told on the reality of waste management in those places. It is places like that that have higher possibilities of suffering from a poor waste management structure based on their over-population and lack of capacity to protect their environment, thus, crippling the quality of health in the camps, and causing exposure to unhealthy or tainted foods, etc. The stories are more perturbing than you think.

The Way Out

Due to the magnitude of the problem of waste management, to many, it might seem that the solution is the provision of more waste disposal services from bins to waste collection. But it doesn’t just end there. Sustainable waste management practices are crucial to revamping waste management in these said areas.

Through sustainable waste management, the waste and the resources that make waste are controlled. And waste management stages from collection to recycling or permanent disposal are adequately accounted for. Unlike the conventional style of dealing with the garbage that ostracizes the people and focuses just on the waste they produce, we need to incorporate sustainable waste management.

We should also teach the people and industries proper disposal methods. While at that, official bodies should be concerned enough to create and uphold regulations that encourage a good waste management structure.

Also, considering the environment first has never been careless; instead, it has always put the health hazards that might arise at bay. And for that, we cannot excuse the role of a sound waste management system. We should give it the highest level of attention because many other things are dependent on it.

Author: Hope Lekwa

Photo credit: www.wbur.org