Public awareness, involvement, and practices in electronic waste management in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Abstract

Following the upsurge of technological developments escorted with scale economies, the electronic industry has decidedly growing and brought one of the major environmental problem known as electronic waste or e-waste. In particular, this study investigates the public awareness about e-waste and the level of engagement in e-waste management practices. The survey covers household heads, general service department workers and higher governmental officials of Addis Ababa. The findings discovered that households’ level of awareness about e-waste and its management was much lower than the general service department personnel and higher governmental officials. Evidently, the ordinal regression outputs has revealed statistically significant results between the sub-cities as well as the educational institutions and governmental sector offices. It also appears that respondent’s educational qualifications and monthly incomes had unequivocally affects the awareness and engagement level. E-waste is considered and treated like other types of municipal solid wastes. It is ostensible that there were newly purchased electronic equipment but which are not yet serviceable due to the absence of manuals, their sizes and designs and lack of knowhow. Therefore, in view of these veracities, the study discernibly highlighted the implications of the existing status and suggests certain recommendations to raise public awareness on e-waste.