CHAPTER ONE

1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
Introducing solid waste management, let's start with a discussion of the material
being managed — solid waste. Solid waste refers to the range of garbage arising
from animal and human activities that are discarded as unwanted and useless.
Solid waste is generated from industrial, residential and commercial activities in
a given area. waste can be categorized based on material, such as plastic, paper,
glass, metal, and organic waste.
Solid wastes by definitions include refuse from households, non hazardous solid
waste from industrial and commercial establishments. Refuse from institutions
market waste, yard waste, and street sweepings. Broadly households waste
otherwise known as residential or domestic waste are made up of waste that are
consequence of households activation these include food preparations, sweeping,
cleaning, fuel burning and gardening was to old clothing. Old famishes, retired
appliances, packaging and reading materials and where diapers or bucket
latrines are used, households waste include faucal materials.
In Ethiopia, mainly cities are faced with the problem of rapid expansion due to
population increase and this, no doubt, brought increasing strain on urban
infrastructure facilities. On area in which this strains has become obvious is in
waste management where the existing system appears to be in capable of coping
experiencing an increase rate generated on daily basis the urban centers are
experiencing an increase rate of environment delibrate, with return dumped a
long drain age channels.
Ethiopia cities have been described as some of the dirtiest the most unsanitary
and the least aesthetically pleasing in the world. This is because some individuals
are direct; this evidence can be seen every day by way of indiscriminate discharge
of garbage in to drains and the high ways.

Due to lack of appropriate planning, inadequate governance, resource constraint

and in effective management sold what is a major source of concern in many
rapidly growing cities in developing countries according to UNEP (2004), sold
health problem everywhere in the world, particularly in developing countries. The
fast expansion of urban agricultural and industrial activities stimulated by rapid
population growth has produced vast amount of solid and liquid wastes that
pollute the environment and destroy resource the changing economic trends and
rapid urbanization also complicate solid waste management in developing in
composition from less organic to more paper, packaging wastes, plastics glass,
metal wastes among other types, a fact leading to the low collection rates
(Bartone & Bernstein, 1993).
In order to cope up with these challenges and due to its crucial role for
public health and protecting the environment, accomplishing effective municipal
solid wastes management should be a priority for emerging cities. However, in the
past most attempts to improve solid waste management in cities have focused on
the technical aspect of the different means of collection and disposal (World
Bank, 1992), it is recently that more attention has been paid to enhancing
institutional arrangement for solid waste service delivery as special emprical on
privatization.
The involvement of the service recipients or clients especially household who are
the primary producers/generators of significant proportion of solid waste
management and perhaps main victim of the effect of uncollected solid waste,
should allowed to determine their out let of providers and participate in making of
sound policies decisions including designing of effective joint solutions of solid
waste management. This would help the service providers, i.e. the municipality,
to understand household’s willingness to participate and pay, therefore, the key
questions here are whether or not how much the households are willing to pay for
the improved solid waste management services be delivered particularly to
residents areas.
Urbanization and urban population in Ethiopia has been increasing in the last
few years the rapid growth of population in urban areas due to under to rural
urban migration income and natural high rate of growth of population as well as
rising per capital income would per support an increased demand in the
provision of required infrastructure and public services (Indian statistical
institute, 2003), however, this has not been the case, as many towns in Ethiopia
lack the financial resource and institutional capacity to provide the most basic
infrastructure and services including solid waste management, for example, in
Markos town, solid waste management service is mainly provided by the
municipality. Solid waste management in the city has been always exalted based
on the role and ignored, however, with the increasing volume of solid waste, the
coverage of solid waste collection is very low, “un collected waste in developing
countries creates serious public health problem in many towns causing many
diseases including often total water borne disease such as cholera and dysentery”
(Sandhya, 1994). In addition, the disposal of solid waste in the city is in
appropriate and is done near farm land on an open space. Due to the in
appropriate disposal, plastic bags taken by wide from the waste disposal site are
polluting the farm land of the farmers residing near Markos. The problems are
likely to become even more pronounced as the level and pace of urbanization
continue to grow rapidly, moreover, cost recovery is a serious problem of solid
waste management in the city.
1.2 Statement of the problem
Collection of waste used to be the responsibilities of municipal authority in the
past; hence, waste collection is a service for which local government is
responsible. In short waste collection is the constitutional responsibility of a local
government. This responsibility is not mutual executive, because there is no local
government area in Ethiopia that can offered the huge financial, technical
administrative human resource requirement care out this constitution
responsibilities the collection wastes in many Ethiopian cities has
Always until very recently, been dominated by government agencies it has been
concluded that it is the responsibility of government the waste collection
problems, as part of government obligation to the citizens.
An explanation for the inability of the government to manage solid waste
collection effectively a rose perhaps from the miss conception of this task as
public good. Respective of the fact that government gave waste collection a
priority in their development objective their ability to curtail the problem of waste
collection deteriorates with time, due to raising capital casts for plant and
equipment, increasing operation and maintenance casts considering the rapid
spatial and population growth of most urban areas with decreasing coverage
levels and demand for improved services and, the need arises for the involvement
of the privet sector and the civil society in the provision of municipal solid waste
service.
1.3 objective of the study
1.3.1 General objective
 The general objective of the study is to evaluate the households willingness to
pay for improve solid waste disposal services in the study area.
1.3.2 Specific objective
1. To assess the general features of the existing solid waste management.

2. To analyses households’ willingness potential to pay for improved waste

disposal.

3. To identify the socio economic variables determine the WTP for improve
waste disposal services.
1.4 research question
1. What is the general existing solid waste management?

2. What are those factors that influence willingness to pay of household for
improved solid waste management?

3. How to identify since economic variable?

1.5 Significance of the study

The study will benefit the researchers, university, urban residents and potential
researcher in this area and the region as well as nation at large. It will also
contribute to the literature to the literature stock place of the study area.
1. The university will benefit from having additional researcher paper for
shelve.

2. It initials other interested researcher to undertake a better and detail study

in the area

3. The finding of this research will be input policy makers.

4. finally this paper is used to know whether households are willing to pay
improve solid waste management service or not and determine willingness
to pay for improved environment quality.

1.6 Scope of the study

This paper focuses on identify the major factors that affect household willingness
to pay for improve solid waste management in Debre-Markos town