Solid Waste Management in the World's Cities

Water and Sanitation in the World's Cities 2010

Un-Habitat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781849711708
• eBook ISBN: 9781136542992
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

In our rapidly urbanizing global society, solid waste management will be a key challenge facing all the world's cities. Solid Waste Management in the World's Cities provides a fresh perspective and new data on one of the biggest issues in urban development.

Using the framework of Integrated Sustainable Waste Management (ISWM), the report brings together unprecedented research from 22 cities across six continents. It uncovers the rich diversity of waste management systems that are in place throughout the world, and draws out the practical lessons for policymakers. The volume will be essential reading for all professionals and policymakers in the field, as well as a valuable resource for researchers and students in all aspects of urban development.

Winner of the International Solid Waste Association Publication Award 2010

Published with UN-Habitat.

CHAPTER

1

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Bharati Chaturvedi

Of the many common threads that bind cities across the world, waste handling, is possibly one of the strongest. Regardless of the context, waste, directly and indirectly, is one of biggest challenges of the urban world. It’s also a city’s calling card. If a city is dirty, the local administration is written off as ineffective. If not, governance is presumed in the public eye to be effective.

This Third Global Report acknowledges escalating challenges without boundaries. Yet, it is not prescriptive – that would go against its fundamental premise in highlighting the value of local innovation and knowledge. What it seeks to do instead is to follow another one of the beliefs that it lays out: to build capacity through networking. The contributors have dug out vast amounts of knowledge and experience, and distilled it in this volume. Most readers might never travel to all of the 22 diverse cities upon which this Global Report is based. Yet, they will have access to real experiences of people working on the ground. Indeed, this is an entirely new kind of networking: that of ideas. Perhaps reading about what one city has been able to do will light up an idea in another.

If you, as a city planner, are hoping that reading this report will be like popping a wisdom pill, be warned. There is only one mantra here: use what you have and build on it with an army of partners. If anything, the report warns against imagining as ideal the systems, technologies and solutions of the developed world and trying to copy them as a means of cleaning the city. It might not work if it lacks local relevance and local buy-in. Just as it is amusing to picture a cycle rickshaw collecting waste in Adelaide, it’s ridiculous to send a giant compactor into the lanes of the old city in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Clearly, modernization is not necessarily motorization. Delve into this idea and you’ll find a few more strands of thought to build from.

All over the world, municipalities and counties have shown how inclusion can achieve spectacular results. There are two kinds of inclusion identified here: service users and service providers. In Varna, Bulgaria, it took a consultant to inform the community that the municipality was picking up half-empty bins. Changing the pick-up frequency came as a relief because it reduced costs in a none-too-wealthy system. In 2007, Quezon City’s waste collection services in the Philippines received a 100 per cent satisfied report card from its households, in large part because it was guided by their choices.

When many developed world cities began solid waste modernization processes, their informal sectors had ceased to be robust. As a result, they had to ‘reinvent’ recycling, almost from scratch. Today’s developing world cities aspiring for modernization aren’t in the same situation. They are already serviced by numerous private players – individuals or micro-enterprises (often informal-sector players) – offering waste collection services, or picking waste from streets and dumps, and trading in it. Their contribution is substantial. In Bamako, Mali, over 120 self-employed micro-enterprises collect approximately 300,000 tonnes of waste annually, while in Lusaka, Zambia, informal service providers reach out to 30 per cent of the city. In Bengaluru and Delhi, India, micro-enterprises function similarly, covering as much as 25 per cent of Delhi across income groups, apart from picking and recycling the valuable waste. The informal sector is clearly any city’s key ally. These human resources can be best deployed in the public interest through appropriate legal and institutional spaces. But that doesn’t imply that the informal recycling sector is a distinctly developing world phenomenon. The research here shows that it exists even in San Francisco, California, and Tompkins County, Ithaca, New York, and in some people’s opinion plays a positive role.

Globally, the thinking is shifting from merely removing waste before it becomes a health hazard to creatively minimizing its environmental impact. Waste reduction is desirable; but, typically, it is not monitored anywhere. Recycling, this Global Report emphasizes, has universal buy-in and a range of approaches are applied. Yet, it must be seen with new eyes. While the commodity value of materials is taken for granted, the service aspect of recycling is relatively new everywhere. Besides, the greatest value of recycling is, literally, as a sink. It absorbs the various costs otherwise incurred were the waste treated using other options, such as landfills or incinerators. This opportunity cost is recognized by enlightened planners. In Rotterdam, The Netherlands, reuse enterprises are given diversion credits from the waste management budget, while in Kunming, China, resource management is so important, it is an institutionally separate set of activities. The cities here suggest that recycling grows as the modernization process expands and begins to control disposal and its costs. Moreover, as both Quezon City and San Francisco demonstrate, strong policies and systems adaptation also give recycling an important push, coupled with change in user behaviour. Meanwhile, Dhaka, Bangladesh, has met global standards to receive carbon credits from composting.

Teasing out these trends requires data. Often, such raw data was not easily available, forcing the question of institutionalization of information generation and storage. Without proper data collection and management, it is difficult to be accountable, transparent and even; to make effective strategies; and to budget for them. The absence of all of this, in turn, creates barriers for modern waste management systems.

As the linkages between valorizing and climate change become clear, proper waste handling has become an important tool to mitigate greenhouse gases. This Third Global Report expresses the hope that it can offer optimism that this is a battle to win, regardless of what kind of city decides to join in this fight. In fact, the report expresses the hope that it will persuade everyone to enlist because our urban future will only be the maturing of our urban present.

CHAPTER

2

INTRODUCTION AND KEY CONCEPTS

INTRODUCING THIS BOOK

This publication is UN-Habitat’s Third Global Report on Water and Sanitation in the World’s Cities. It focuses on the state of solid waste management, which is an important challenge facing all of the world’s cities. Previous volumes focused on water supply and sanitation. The book has four main aims:

1 to showcase the good work that is being done on solid waste by cities around the world, large and small, rich and poor;

2 to look at what drives change in solid waste management, how things work in cities and what seems to work better under which circumstances;

3 to help decision-makers, practitioners and ordinary citizens understand how a solid waste management system works; and

4 to inspire people everywhere, in good communication with their neighbours, constituents and leaders, to make their own decisions on the next steps in developing a solution appropriate to their own city’s particular circumstances and needs.

This book is designed both to fill a gap in the literature and knowledge base about solid waste management in low-, middle- and high-income countries, and to provide a fresh perspective and new data. The book distinguishes itself in a number of ways:

• First and foremost, it is based on the framework of integrated sustainable waste management (ISWM), especially the concepts of sustainability and inclusive good practice that have broadened and enriched the field.

• The 20 real city examples provide up-to-date data and are used to inform questions of waste policy, good and bad practice, management, governance, financing and many other issues. The focus is on processes rather than technologies, and the goal is to encourage a different kind of thinking.

• It uncovers the rich diversity of waste management systems that are in place around the world. This book brings out common elements and develops a lens for ‘viewing’ a solid waste management system, while at the same time encouraging every city to develop its own individual solution, appropriate to its specific history, economy, demography and culture, and to its human, environmental and financial resources.

• A central tenet of the book is that there is no one right answer that can be applied to all cities and all situations. In this, the book challenges the notion that all a developing country city needs to do is to copy a system that works in a particular developed country city.

• This is neither a ‘how-to’ book nor a ‘let’s fix it’ book, although the discerning reader will find elements of both, but more of a ‘how do they do it now and what do they need to do more or less of’ kind of discussion.

A typical view of a canal in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in the 1960s

© Stadsarchief Amsterdam, used with permission

Waste thrown into a watercourse alongside a neighbourhood in Nairobi, Kenya, 2008

© UN-Habitat

This book’s ambition is to look at solid waste and the world’s cities in a fresh new way; to observe what works and what does not; and to let this inform the policy process and contribute to rethinking the whole waste management concept. The authors see an urgent need for this in transitional, low- and middle-income countries; but it may well be that looking from another viewpoint gives new insights to developed countries as well. The goal is to provide an honest look at how cities – large and small, complex and simple, coastal and inland, in rich, poor and transitional countries – do and do not succeed to make reasonable choices that serve their citizens and protect their environment at acceptable financial cost.

Looking beyond what is happening to what could be improved, the book seeks to make the principles and elements of sound practice in waste management clear and accessible. The book explores both expensive ‘best practice’ technologies, as used in high-income countries, and moderate-cost creative alternatives that improve the environment.

Most books on solid waste treat the solid waste systems in developing and transitional countries as imperfect or incomplete copies of an ideal system that operates in developed countries such as Canada, Denmark or Japan. Many, if not most, waste interventions seek to perfect or improve the copying process and spread the ideal.

What is frequently overlooked is that the higher-income countries in Europe and North America have been busy with solid waste for the last 40 years or so. The systems and technologies in use there were not developed overnight, and they fit the climates, social conditions and economies of Northern European society. What is not always clear to the visitor to Denmark or Germany is that even these ‘clean giants’ did not move from open dumping to current best practice in one step. They and their citizens debated and struggled and agreed to disagree. Their engineers took risks, made innovations and made their share of mistakes. Some things that were designed 20 years ago – such as the Dutch producer-responsibility agreement for packaging – have never worked, while other innovations such as dual collection of organic waste and residuals have made contributions to both economy and environment.

This book responds to a growing global consensus that cities in low-income, middle-income and transitional countries need to take charge of the modernization process and to develop their own models for waste management that are more than simply ‘imperfect copies’. Citizens of the world need to have solid waste and recycling systems that serve their needs and match their wishes and what they can and want to afford. This calls for a larger variety of models and approaches tailored to fit specific local conditions.

A good baseline analysis and a transparent stakeholder process will reveal one or more logical ‘next steps’ that each city can take to improve what they have and move the whole system towards effective, affordable performance. Because modern waste management is about much more than a ‘technical fix’, such next steps can relate to making the institutional framework stronger, sending waste system employees to training, shifting the recycling strategy to be easier for citizens, or phasing out energy-intensive approaches to collection. Technologies are visible evidence of humanity’s best intentions to transform solid waste into a safe, inert substance. They carry the system, but they are not the system. And if they work at all, they do so because of the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• List of Figures, Tables and Boxes
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• A Note to Decision-Makers
• Chapter 1 Executive Summary
• Chapter 2 Introduction and Key Concepts
• Chapter 3 Profiling the Reference Cities
• City Inserts
• Chapter 4 The Three Key Integrated Sustainable Waste Management System Elements in the Reference Cities
• Chapter 5 The Integrated Sustainable Waste Management Governance Features in the Reference Cities
• Chapter 6 Reflections and Recommendations
• Annex 1 Glossary of Terms
• References
• Index