Evaluating Household Solid Waste Sampling: Is an Eight-Day Consecutive Method Necessary? A Preliminary Study

Abstract

Household solid waste sampling is a critical part of solid waste management planning as the results determine the design of required infrastructures. However, the method suggested by the Indonesian national standard requires time and high cost as it must be carried out for 8 consecutive days. Hence, it is necessary to evaluate this requirement and designing the more efficient sampling design without compromising the results. The study conducted solid waste sampling for 16 consecutive days from 31 middle income households in Jakarta, the Capital City of Indonesia, resulting in a pool of 16 consecutive daily averages of solid waste generation per capita data. From this pool, we generated: (1) solid waste generation per capita from eight consecutive days, (2) six consecutive days, (3) four consecutive days, and (4) eight non-consecutive days data. The results showed that the average of solid waste generation per capita for datasets (1), (2), (3), and (4) are 0.505 (± 0.022) kg/day/cap, 0.495 (± 0.044) kg/day/cap, 0.501 (± 0.035) kg/day/cap, and 0.492 (± 0.02) kg/day/cap consecutively, indicating the same estimates of solid waste generation per capita can be achieved by four scenarios.