Mulugeta, Bandirachin (2013) Environmental Impacts of Disposable Babies’ Diapers and Mitigating the Impact Through Composting the Fluff Pulp: The Case of Addis Ababa City Dwellers. Masters thesis, Addis Ababa University.
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Abstract
Ethiopia is one of the top ten most diaper consumers and forecasted to remain on the same level until 2025. Taking into account the socio-economic, purchasing power and population size, the demand is expected to reach, yet another record high especially in the city of Addis Ababa. Disposable diapers are one of the common necessities in today’s life style of baby raising parents. Despite their convenience during usage, they have several dangerous environmental drawbacks: trash taking over the nation’s landfill facilities, polluting ground water, air, soil and GHG emission, etc. While dumped in landfills, disposable diapers take about 500 years to decompose. So, the present thesis relied on assessing the current rate of distribution in the City of Addis Ababa and its hazardous effect on the environment in relation to disposal mechanisms and its general effect on solid waste generation. The thesis also aimed at reducing its impacts through raising public awareness, determining means of increasing decomposition rate through composting the filler (fluff pulp) of the diaper. According to the data collected from five sub cities (Bole, Arada, Qirkos, Kolfe and Akaki-Kality) about diaper usage, 42% of the parents are disposable diaper consumers. So, in the city of Addis Ababa there are about 45195 children at the age group of 2.5 years using a total number of 65080.8 diapers or a net weight of 2875.3kg of diapers per day out of the total 107606 children of the same age. This indicates 1035097.1kg of diaper usage per year constituting 0.37% of municipal solid waste generation per year. It has been found that through composting the filler (fluff pulp) of a diaper through source separation reduces the landfill burden imposed by disposed diapers alone to a significant degree, by 50-60%. The present result showed that the 500 years decomposition period of disposable diapers can be minimized to one to eight month using composting techniques.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Masters) |
|---|---|
| Subjects: | G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GE Environmental Sciences |
| Divisions: | Africana |
| Depositing User: | Selom Ghislain |
| Date Deposited: | 11 Sep 2018 07:49 |
| Last Modified: | 11 Sep 2018 07:49 |
| URI: | http://thesisbank.jhia.ac.ke/id/eprint/5097 |
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