Assessment and characterization of food waste and human wastes (feaces and urine) generated from Jimma University Campuses

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.