Municipal Solid Waste Generation Forecast using an ARIMA Model: A Focus on Abuja City, Nigeria

In this paper, an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model was used to forecast the municipal solid waste generation rates of Nigeria’s federal capital city, Abuja. The historical data used (January 2014 to December 2020) for the forecast were obtained from the Abuja Environmental Protection Board. A practical method of Box-Jenkins which includes four iterative sequences; stationarity check, model identification, estimation of parameters, and diagnostics were used for implementing the ARIMA models. The results indicate that an ARIMA (1, 1, 9) is the optimal model having outperformed other candidate models in terms of the adjusted determination coefficient and information criteria and hence, employed for forecasting the quantity of waste generation up to the year 2025. About 1,288,140 tons of municipal solid waste are expected to be generated from 2021 to 2025 in the city. It is hoped that this study will be useful for planning and developing an effective waste management system by the Federal Capital Territory Administration.