Indicators of sustainability for municipal solid waste management: Case study of the city of São Carlos (SP)

Abstract

One way to operationalize the concept of sustainability is through the use of indicators, an important tool to guide the public managers in the process of making decisions. The objective of this paper was the proposition of sustainability indicators for public management of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) in São Carlos (SP), from the perspective of five dimensions: environmental, economic, social, political and cultural. The strategy adopted for the indicators development was the identification of priority problems for the MSW management, by interviewing the municipal managers. The results include a set of 15 sustainability indicators, as their values express three trends: favorable, unfavorable or very unfavorable to sustainability. This research showed that the development of a local indicator system should involve different actors in order to legitimize the effective use of this useful management tool.