Sustainability indicators in urban solid waste management and implications for human health

The National Solid Waste Policy, focused on integrated and sustainable solid waste management, has stimulated discussions towards the construction of scientific knowledge and encouraged a change process towards a new human and socioenvironmental development model. In that perspective, managers should make their decisions based not only on current legal requirements, but mainly in search of sustainable development and human health promotion. The objective in this research was to build a list of sustainability indicators for urban solid waste management and implications for human health, based on the guidelines of this policy. The data collection, based on the Delphi technique, was undertaken in three phases, using a scale to measure the level of importance of these indicators to reach a consensus among solid waste researchers, obtained from the CNPq Research Group Database. The first phase involved 52 subjects who first analyzed 43 indicators (13 environmental, 8 social, 10 economic, 7 institutional and 5 health-related), scoring the level of importance of each. As a result, 17 indicators were excluded because no consensus was reached among the subjects, 10 were maintained, 16 were changed and 48 new indicators were included according to the subjects\' suggestions, closing off this phase with 74 indicators after the data analysis. In the second data collection phase, 51 subjects contributed who excluded 18 indicators and maintained 56. In the third phase, the 50 subjects not only scored the level of importance of each indicator, but also justified those cases in which they did not find the indicator important. In that phase, none of the indicators was excluded and, at the end, 56 indicators continued in the 5 dimensions: 13 environmental, 8 social, 16 economic, 7 institutional and 12 health, with a level of consensus among the subjects that ranged from 82% to 98%. Among the indicators proposed in this research, those related to waste production stand out, which are already used in public as well as private sectors, in line with the new guidelines of the National Solid Waste Policy. The list constructed in this research, however, includes other indicators that add new perspectives in the different dimensions proposed, such as the health indicators, the dimension in which the smallest number of indicators was excluded in the construction process of the indicators. The proposed indicators can help to identify updated data to elaborate Municipal Integrated Solid Waste Management Plans, and also expand the discussions about public environmental health policies, not only focused on solid waste, but also aiming to achieve better environmental and health conditions in the context of the current Brazilian reality (AU)