International Journal of Environmental Science and Development

Abstract—Kitchen and food wastes discarded from the food related premises contributes to the high proportion of organic waste that end up in its landfill. The methane gas released during the dumping of food waste at the landfills is unsafe because the gas is flammable, and it is also a strong greenhouse gas. To tackle this problem, efforts are necessary to reduce the kitchen waste generated and to manage the disposal of waste sustainably. However, for this initiative to be successful, the owners and workers in food sector play an important role. The main objective of this study was to evaluate the practice, knowledge, and attitude of the food premises owners towards managing the kitchen and food waste in the district of Bintulu, Sarawak. Thus, a survey was conducted among 130 owners of randomly selected food premises. The collected data showed that food waste has the largest portion (46.7%) produced in Bintulu compared to other MSW such as plastic, paper, glass, metal, etc. Most respondents prefer to dump the food and kitchen wastes into garbage bins (79.2%) rather than composting (6.2%), donate, reuse, and recycle. This result proved the importance of building a biogas plant for kitchen and food waste since the respondents preferred to throw away the leftover food rather than composting the food. It will also help to propose appropriate treatment technologies to support the National Solid Waste Management (SWM) Policy and National Green Technology Policy for waste-to-wealth projects.

Index Terms—Food and kitchen waste, public practice, knowledge level, solid waste management, waste recovery.

Azira Sanusi, Nurul Husna Che Hamzah, Nor Shafinaz Azman, and Azizul Hakim Lahuri are with the Department of Science and Technology, Faculty of Humanities, Management and Science, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Bintulu Sarawak Campus, 97008 Bintulu, Sarawak, Malaysia (corresponding author: Azira Sanusi; email: azirasanusi@upm.edu.my, gs56633@student.upm.edu.my, gs56703@student.upm.edu.my, azizulhakim@upm.edu.my).
Nozieana Khairuddin is with the Department of Science and Technology, Faculty of Humanities, Management and Science, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Bintulu Sarawak Campus, 97008 Bintulu, Sarawak, Malaysia (e-mail: nozieana@upm.edu.my). She is also with the Institut Ekosains Borneo, Universiti Putra Malaysia Bintulu Sarawak Campus, 97008 Bintulu, Sarawak, Malaysia.

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Cite: Nurul Husna Che Hamzah, Azira Sanusi, Nozieana Khairuddin, Nor Shafinaz Azman, and Azizul Hakim Lahuri, "Public Practice, Knowledge and Attitude on Managing Kitchen and Food Wastes in Bintulu, Sarawak, Malaysia," International Journal of Environmental Science and Development vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 118-123, 2022.

Copyright © 2022 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).