Environment & Solid Waste

Making Mombasa Green

Charting a Sustainable Path for Waste Management

Mombasa County Government aims to promote an effective and efficient system for a sustainable clean and green environment to the residents of Mombasa County. As is the case in many developing countries, this essential service is unfortunately severely lacking with waste collection rates often lower than 70 percent and the collected waste often disposed of through uncontrolled landfilling. Due to increase in population and rapid urbanization, the infrastructure available is increasingly incapable of dealing with the amount of waste generated. As a result, many residents end up either dumping their garbage on public land, river and drains, or simply burning them. Illegal dumping sites are popular where the residents accumulate their waste at a particular spot before setting them on fire after a few days.

Our History
1993 - 2017

Solid Waste Management Program

The county has a population of 1.2 million inhabitants with an estimated 200,000 people operating in the county but staying outside the county. The county has a potential to generates approximately 900 tons of municipal solid waste per day, 60% include organic waste, while the rest in dry waste, the collection capacity is approximately 50% percent of the total waste generated is formally managed by the county government and private collectors; about 400 tons of waste is not collected necessitating a change of strategy in streamlining Solid management systems.

Waste Segregation, Recycling, and Landfill Enhancement for a Greener Future

The new strategy is geared towards improving waste collection through waste segregation, recovery, recycling for value addition and improving waste handling in a sanitary landfill. This system will be adopted, supported by legislation, to release waste collection, transportation, recovery processing, recycling and disposal of solid waste while restricting the role of the county government to regulation of the industry. The County intends to provide a piece of land to the successful bidders to facilitate their waste management processes and value addition.

What I Do

Project Benefits

The benefits of the solid waste management project are:

  1. Promotion and further enhancement of the global economic competitiveness of Kenya’s Gate City Mombasa through waste management investments.
  2. Significant reduction of the amount of environmental pollution within the County emanating from waste management to assure clean and healthy environment.
  3. A coordinated framework for the County solid waste management approach that include the collection, processing, recycling and disposal of waste within the County.
  4. A multimodal, high throughput and high circularity waste management systems.
  5. Proper coordination that compliments existing waste management approaches.

Project Duration: Medium term

Project Output

  1. The proposed waste collection, processing, recycling and disposal is expected to apply attractive modern and current waste management techniques offering a new unique opportunity to create of collecting, processing, recycling and managing solid waste through provision of infrastructure facilities of the required standard.
  2. The solid waste management investment model is expected to focus on improving environmental governance, reducing pollution and provision of opportunities through the effort of recycling for both biodegradable and non-biodegradable County solid waste. This will also significantly deal with the threat of waste management problem that has given rise to mushrooming illegal dumpsites within the county.