Urban Environmental Consultation with Communities

Expansion of existing solid waste facilities and siting of new solid waste facilities require extensive public consultation, because of the potential environmental impact significance of such facilities. This includes consultation on waste transfer facilities, as well as, waste composting and disposal facilities.For new sanitary landfill facilities, the World Bank typically requires environmental impact assessments (EIA) prior to Board presentation. The EIA requirements inherently stipulates iterative and intensive public consultations

As part of public consultations, potential mitigation measures are conceived and presented to the public for each major potential environmental impact. Landfill leachate into ground and surface water is a priority impact category in climates with net rainfall infiltration. Similarly, there are measures that are applicable to mitigating landfill gas, particulate matter, and bio-aerosol emissions. Landfill design and siting conditions can usually be arranged to mitigate impacts, but at a cost.

Mitigative measures are also available to address water and air emissions from other facilities such as transfer and composting facilities. Traffic from collection and transfer trucks is a priority impact category of solid waste transfer facilities. Careful siting is one of the key ways of minimizing traffic congestion problems. However, design considerations that enable speedy flow-through of solid waste vehicles also mitigate impact, such as having enough unloading bays for the collection trucks and internal site roads that readily circulate traffic from separate entrance to exit gates.

Aside from public consultation related to environmental impacts of new facilities, there is commonly a need to conduct consultation on other aspects of solid waste management.For example, when evaluating changes in labor practices or involvement of the private sector consultation with solid waste labor is advised. When making changes in existing informal sector collection of recyclables from door-to-door and at land disposal sites consultation with the waste recycling community is necessary. Many waste-pickers and recyclers live in extreme poverty and projects must be sensitive to finding ways that support their livelihood and human dignity. Because solid waste disposal improvements add to the cost of solid waste management, cost recovery is an issue to be discussed with the public. Social assessments, demand surveys, and willingness-to-pay surveys are mechanisms to obtain perspective on public preferences. Each of these issues requiring public consultation tend to add more time and effort in the project development cycle and should be taken into consideration from the on set of project formulation.