| Abstract: |
Urban local bodies across the developing world are running out of land to bury what their residents throw away, and roughly half of that discarded material is organic in nature and technically avoidable at the landfill stage. This paper examines the extent to which decentralised and community-scale composting can reduce the volume of biodegradable waste that ultimately reaches municipal landfill sites, using a mixed quantitative dataset drawn from household surveys, ward-level waste audits, and composting-unit performance logs collected across three urban zones over a twelve-month period. Waste composition records, moisture and carbon-nitrogen ratios, compost yield efficiency, cost comparisons against landfill tipping, and greenhouse gas displacement estimates were tabulated and analysed to test whether composting produces a measurable and economically defensible reduction in landfill inflow. The findings indicate that wards operating active composting programmes diverted between 34 and 61 percent of organic waste away from landfill disposal, with corresponding reductions in transportation cost and methane generation potential. Composting quality, however, varied sharply with feedstock segregation practices at source, and poorly segregated inputs reduced both compost marketability and process efficiency. The paper situates these results against comparable studies from other Asian and African cities and argues that composting works best not as a standalone technology but as part of a segregation-first policy architecture. |
