Technical indicators to improve municipal solid waste management in developing countries: A case in Mexico

•Indicators to monitor basic MSWM operation were identified based on 66 study cases.•Includes ten indicators that encompass street cleaning, collection and disposal.•Study cases show what information can be available in developing countries.•A method to appraise the reliability of indicators based on data quality.•Results show the need to increase MSW collection coverage and disposal conditions. Nowadays, increasingly complex sets of indicators are used to compare and diagnose municipal solid waste management (MSWM). These sets incorporate new priorities regarding sustainability and focus on measuring the progress to zero waste. Nevertheless, in developing countries, where MSWM is still striving to protect health from the potential impacts of waste, the MSWM information available is scarce and of low quality. This work proposes a basic set of indicators for analyzing technical aspects of street cleaning, waste collection and disposal in such contexts. Based on the assessment of 66 Mexican municipalities, ten indicators were identified that can be calculated with the information available. For each indicator, reference values were established, and their performance was evaluated by means of a traffic light system. In addition, a method that allows the quality of the information to be classified into four levels according to the data source, its uncertainty, the temporal coverage, and its spatial coverage was applied. The results obtained revealed an incipient implementation of MSWM and highlighted the need to increase the coverage of the collection services and to improve the conditions of the disposal sites in most of the municipalities that were studied. The proposed set of indicators can be used as a starting point to systematize the monitoring and detection of areas of improvement in the MSWM of the municipalities studied, as well as in other systems in similar contexts.