Organic Solid Waste in a Hotel in the City of João Pessoa, Brazil: Generation Rate and Measures to Reduce the Amount of Disposal in Landfill

Abstract

National (Brazilian) Solid Waste Policy classifies these items according to their origin into 11 categories, including waste from commercial enterprises, such as hotels, a major waste generator in the sector. The objective of this paper is to analyze the generation rate of organic waste in a hotel and the reduction in its amount to be sent to landfill, according to the measures of decentralized composting and vermicomposting. The study obtained the amount of organic solid waste generated in the hotel from daily weighting along seven months, which allowed to calculate its generation rate and plan implementation measures. Results showed that, in average, 173.26 kg/day of organic waste were generated and taking into account the average population of 169 persons in the hotel, a generation rate of 1,02 kg/person. day was obtained. Decentralized vermicomposting required 0.91x10-3 m3 to process 1 kg of organic waste comparing with the same value for the composting process: 2.07x10 -3 m3. Given these figures, vermicomposting proved advantageous for composting process for providing good quality vermicompost with lower volume requirement than the composting process.