ABSTRACT
Like big cities around the world, Caracas is not exempt from the problem of municipal solid waste (MSW) management. The metropolitan area population has grown sharply in the last 10 years, due to expected growth and also due to migration of working population from other regions of the country. Current infrastructure and service for MSW collection, transport, and final disposal seems not to be sufficient. This chapter provides a general overview of this situation, including some figures that may give a better idea of this reality. This chapter is a comparison to a paper by Tin et al. (1), "Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Municipal Solid Waste Collection system in Yangon, Myanmar." In this study, the authors analyze the problem of MSW collection for a city in a developing country in Asia. There are many similarities between the problems encountered in Yangon and the problems of MSW management in Caracas and its metropolitan area (CMa), the capital city of Venezuela, a developing country in South America.
