Municipal Solid Waste Management: the interdependence between communication and selective collection

Abstract

Considering the role of communication for the effectiveness of selective waste collection programs (SCP), the research aimed to analyze the communication process used among the actors involved in waste SCP. In order to achieve the objective, a county located in the interior of the state of São Paulo, Brazil, was used as the case study. In the research, diagrams of information transmission were created, based on the Shannon Weaver model and adapted by DeFleur, so that communication gaps in the explored SCP and possibilities for improvement were identified. Among the results obtained in the study, it was observed that there is a distance between population and the cooperative that impairs the interactivity between these actors; the current information is insufficient to reinforce behavior in the population, since they don’t take into account environmental, social and economic factors as a form of mobilization; and the most effective means of communication to the public (speakers on the trucks) is no longer used to publicize the program. Thus, the communication in the analyzed SCP still lacks improvements, since the study identified noises in the communication that lead to failures in the selective collection of the county in question.