Planos municipais de gestão integrada de resíduos sólidos: mito ou realidade? Municipal planning for waste management: myth or reality?

This paper reports the results of a research conducted in the 26 Brazilian municipalities located at a central region of Sao Paulo State. Its main objectives were to draw a profile of the stages in which the municipalities were in the process of drafting their local plans, as required by Law 12.305, known as the National Solid Waste Policy and to identify the main factors, favorable and restrictive, which conditioned the preparation of the plans. To achieve its objectives, the research, qualitative in the method, with descriptive and exploratory purposes and outlined as the embedded case studies, made use of two procedures for data collection: the use of secondary data from previous research of the IBGE, and the direct data collection with municipalities, through telephone interviews. The results show, first, a large discrepancy between the primary and secondary data. In addition, they confirmed the greater difficulty of the municipalities of smaller population size to comply with the provisions of Law. Finally, the research ascertained that the major difficulties faced by