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ABSTRACT
Mankind has long struggled with the problem of waste, but it was not until the nineteenthcentury industrial revolution that a sharp increase in production and an avalanche of new inventions started generating huge amounts of problematic and increasingly harmful waste. The problem of waste as a global threat to the environment is therefore an entirely new phenomenon, fully determined by human activity over the past 200 years. However, looking through the prism of the growing global population, urbanization and excessive consumerism, it can be expected to become even more burning. The aim of the article is to show selected causes and effects of improper municipal waste management in a global perspective. The analysis was performed taking into account demographic, social, urban, raw-materials, energy and environmental factors.
Keywords: municipal waste management, solid waste management
1. INTRODUCTION
The picture of the modern world, inhabited by over 7.7 billion people (UN, 2019, p. 1) spread across more than 190 countries, is extremely diverse in many ways. Projections for the coming decades show that the Earth is on the brink of a significant demographic explosion. However, mankind is increasingly aware of the fact that the world is beginning to grapple with many issues and threats that until recently did not exist or passed unnoticed. Very often, due to economic and financial motives, as well as the sheer scale of these emerging phenomena, they have a global outreach and by default assume global dimensions. What is more, because of their interconnection and interpenetration, problems may quickly escalate and become difficult to solve. An example is municipal waste, which is a byproduct of everyday human activity that poses a serious threat to the environment around the world (Ogundipe, Jimoh, 2015, p. 1305). The reasons for this state of affairs should be sought mainly in demographics, since the growing global population means increased demand for food whose consumption generates a large amount of municipal waste. It is also not without significance that the world is becoming an increasingly urbanized place, while the high standard of living in affluent countries and overconsumption in emerging markets create a constant, unbridled demand for more and more goods. In all this, improper waste management contributes to the wastage and depletion of raw materials, and...