Estudo sobre a regulação aplicada ao manejo de resíduos sólidos urbanos no Brasil

Abstract

According to Law nº 11.445/2007 (BRASIL, 2007) all basic sanitation services in Brazil must be regulated in order to guarantee their execution with quality to the population. According to a survey carried out in 2019 by the Brazilian Association of Regulatory Agencies (ABAR), 30 regulatory agencies acted more consistently with water supply and sewage services, covering 2,968 municipalities, while only eight regulated municipal solid waste management services (MSWMS) in 232 municipalities. In addition, there is still no regulatory model defined and implemented in the country for this sanitation component, which greatly impacts the supply and execution of MSW collection, transport, treatment and final destination services. In this context, the general objective of this work was to obtain a picture – considering challenges and advances – of the regulation applied to MSW in Brazil, from October 2022 to March 2023. The qualitative methodology was developed in three stages: i) mapping of the agencies that regulate MSWMS and its regulated services and evaluation of its normative, management and planning instruments, through bibliographical and documentary research; ii) evaluation of the regulatory mechanisms employed by the agencies based on interviews/questionnaire application; and iii) evaluation of the regulation implemented for the MSWMS through interviews/application of a questionnaire to regulated service providers and environmental agencies in Minas Gerais and specialists in the area. 15 agencies that regulate MSWMS were located in 8.4% of municipalities in Brazil, pointing to the low coverage of the sector. The lack of transparency and standardization in the availability of data by most agencies on their websites compromised the collection of information about their regulatory activities. The incipient regulation of MSWMS was verified not only by the numbers surveyed, but was confirmed by the reports of members of environmental agencies, specialists and the regulatory entities that contributed to the research. Deficit understanding of the work carried out by the agencies and the consequent low designation of regulatory entity by the holders; the absence of a collection instrument or insufficient collection for the provision of MSWMS; the deficient contractual modeling that impacts the performance of agencies; the need to increase the number of agencies and to train their technical staff were some of the challenges identified. However, some important steps were also noted, such as the presence of a central entity, National Water and Basic Sanitation Agency (ANA), which has been working to standardize the regulation of the sector, the commitment of the regulatory entities to knowing the realities of the municipalities and proposing coherent and viable possibilities for each location and the progressive adherence of municipalities to regulation.