Abstract:
Food waste and environmental, societal, and economic impacts are attracting increasing
attention across the globe.Around 2.4 billion people do not have sanitation facility and about
2 million people die every year due to diarrheal diseases, most of them are children less than
5 years of age. Jimma University Campuses generate large quantity of food wastes and
human excreta from sources mainly from cafeterias and lounges as well as toilets.The main
objective of the study is toassess and characterizefood waste and human wastes generated
from Jimma University Campuses. The study was conducted in three Jimma University
campuses at Jimma university main campus ,Jimma University Institute of Technology and
Jimma University College of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine from May 11-25 /2017.A
descriptive survey study design was used. Among the five students’ cafeteria and nine staffs’
lounge, three cafeterias and three lounges were chosenwith purpose. The sample size for
student was 12,915 and 465 academic staff was chosen for study from the three Jimma
university campuses. The food waste collection was conducted for consecutive seven days.
Food waste was weighed in kg by mass balance.
Taking into account and difficultycollection of human waste, investigator considered about
15 individual volunteer students who are willing to participate for the study. The human
waste sample was collected consecutive is for three days at 24hrs.Urine was weighed in liters
by bottle plastics. Feaces sample weighed in gram by using sensitive balance. Completed
forms were checked for errors and data were inserted into Excel's spreadsheet and saved as
data file and descriptive statistics was used. It was found from the study that daily food
wastes generated was around 1,662kg /day at students’ cafeteria and staffs’ lounge. The
result showed that waste generated daily from students was about 1,485kg/day. Food waste
generated daily from staffs’ lounge of JUC was about 177kg/day.In this study, human urine
generation rate per day was 1.37litres. The finding an average wet weight of human feaces
generation rates per day per student was 121 g/cap/day. The nutrient contents of food waste
were78,861.9kgN and 7,537.25.25kgP/cap/year of nitrogen and Phosphorous respectively;
Whereas, the nutrient contents of human waste were in total 5.8 and 0.5 kg/cap /year
respectively. Food waste alone has fertilizers of N/P/K/Ca.
