Abstract

Kitchen and food wastes discarded from the foodrelated premises contributes to the high proportion of organicwaste that end up in its landfill. The methane gas releasedduring the dumping of food waste at the landfills is unsafebecause the gas is flammable, and it is also a strong greenhousegas. To tackle this problem, efforts are necessary to reduce thekitchen waste generated and to manage the disposal of wastesustainably. However, for this initiative to be successful, theowners and workers in food sector play an important role. Themain objective of this study was to evaluate the practice,knowledge, and attitude of the food premises owners towardsmanaging the kitchen and food waste in the district of Bintulu,Sarawak. Thus, a survey was conducted among 130 owners ofrandomly selected food premises. The collected data showedthat food waste has the largest portion (46.7%) produced inBintulu compared to other MSW such as plastic, paper, glass,metal, etc. Most respondents prefer to dump the food andkitchen wastes into garbage bins (79.2%) rather thancomposting (6.2%), donate, reuse, and recycle. This resultproved the importance of building a biogas plant for kitchenand food waste since the respondents preferred to throw awaythe leftover food rather than composting the food. It will alsohelp to propose appropriate treatment technologies to supportthe National Solid Waste Management (SWM) Policy andNational Green Technology Policy for waste-to-wealth projects.