The Environment Directorate in Homs Governorate organized, on Wednesday, an awareness meeting on ways to develop solid waste management and address its challenges, contributing to reducing pollution and alleviating the financial and service burdens associated with waste collection and treatment.
Stages and Mechanisms of Waste Handling
The Directorate’s Director, Talal Al-Ali, delivered a lecture on integrated environmental waste management, outlining the stages of handling waste and ways to mitigate its negative environmental impacts, aiming to enhance the knowledge of the Directorate’s technical staff. Al-Ali emphasized the importance of reducing waste generation at the source, sorting it, and reusing or recycling it, thereby contributing to the preservation of natural resources and environmental safety.
Al-Ali discussed mechanisms for organizing waste transport operations according to a studied plan, based on determining container locations and estimating their capacities to match each area’s needs, as well as studying transport schedules and the number of daily collections. He pointed to experiences of pioneering countries in waste management, including Qatar, and the possibility of benefiting from them to develop the sector’s reality in Syria, particularly in converting waste into useful energy or producing organic fertilizer and plastic pellets.
Challenges and Proposed Solutions
Al-Ali highlighted the Directorate’s role in managing solid waste, which focuses on planning, awareness, and supervision, explaining that proper planning helps reduce collection costs, while awareness helps improve citizens’ behavior. He noted that the most prominent challenges include a shortage of necessary equipment for waste collection, especially compactors, a lack of workers and supervisors, weak community awareness, and the high costs of managing this sector for administrative units.
Al-Ali indicated that source separation represents one of the important means to reduce waste quantities and the costs of collecting and treating it, and to limit the health effects resulting from its accumulation, especially organic waste. He stressed the importance of expanding awareness programs to include all segments of society, monitoring collection, transport, and treatment operations, alongside studying technical solutions that allow for the utilization of recyclable materials.
Awareness Programs and Sustainability
Suzan Tamer from the Directorate’s Climate Change and Environmental Awareness Department pointed to the awareness programs implemented by the department targeting children regarding the necessity of source waste separation. She presented practical experiences in this regard, including implementing a source waste separation experiment in the new Al-War area using the two-bag system, as well as organizing awareness lectures targeting children, youth, and adolescents.
Nahla Zaqrit, Head of the Monitoring and Environmental Reclamation Department at the Directorate, emphasized the importance of enhancing the knowledge of the Environment Directorate’s technical staff in integrated waste management methods and benefiting from successful experiences in this field. The Directorate works to enhance environmental awareness among different age groups through field activities and interactive programs, focusing on schools and children as a fundamental segment in spreading environmental culture.
Source: Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA)
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