1 October, 2025 | Publication, Waste and resource management
DCW was delighted to write the Introduction to October’s editorial in the ISWA peer-reviewed journal Waste Management & Research (WM&R), where Mike Webster gives his personal reflections from five years of working to extend waste collection services to previously underserved communities in Indonesia. The world is struggling to deal with the global waste emergency of more than 2.7 billion people worldwide lacking access to the basic service of municipal solid waste collection. Mike’s reflections offer a ‘breath of fresh air’ – using his words to summarise: let’s not forget the basics of solid waste collection and controlled disposal, let’s be clear-eyed about the challenges, and let’s get on with it…
Thank you to the Editors-in-Chief Anke Bockreis, Arne M. Ragossnig and Costas Velis for publishing the editorial this month in the Special Issue of WM&R for the ISWA2025 World Congress in Buenos Aires from October 27-29 2025.
17 March, 2025 | Publication, Waste and resource management
In DCW’s new paper with Andy Whiteman and Nicole Hennessy, published open access by the leading journal Oxford Development Studies, we spotlight the urgent need to rethink how to extend waste services to reach underserved communities. UNEP and ISWA’s GWMO2024 estimates that 2.7 billion people worldwide still lack access to solid waste collection, with at a least a billion more whose collected waste is open dumped or burned. Progress in extending services in upper middle income countries and in parts of larger cities in lower income countries has been steady, but too many unserved or underserved communities are proving hard to reach. We argue that it is time for a radical rethink of our approach to tackle this global waste emergency.
The benefits of extending services to underserved communities (i.e. reaching 95+% on both components of indicator SDG 11.6.1. i.e collection coverage and controlled disposal) are Win⁵ (i.e. win-win-win-win-win): better community services, reduced disease outbreaks, more sustainable livelihoods, reduced municipal solid waste quantities and management costs, and reduced local and global environment impacts. The costs are local but the benefits are global and local: extending services to meet SDG11.6.1 would reduce macroplastic dispersal to the environment by ~80% and significantly mitigate climate heating.
Cities can transition earlier to more circular, integrated, sustainable, waste and resource management (WaRM), through initiating governance reforms; making early no regret investments; and focusing on what money matters? No regret investments include extending collection services; supporting recovery value chains – e.g. separating (wet) organic wastes from (dry) recyclable materials at source unlocks markets for both; and upgrading existing designated disposal facilities. A blend of finance is needed, from national and city sources, resource revenues, disposal pricing, extended producer responsibility (EPR) and international development (including climate and plastics) finance). New multi-lateral impact funds are needed that target extension of services to underserved communities.
Thanks to the Oxford Development Studies editors Jo Beall and her co-editor Mansoor Ali for inviting us to contribute to the (in process) Special Issue on Integrated Sustainable (Solid) Waste Management.
27 March, 2024 | Publication, Resource and waste management, Waste Management
I am very pleased to collaborate with Tearfund to reframe the discussion around waste management in the Plastics Treaty negotiations. The Plastics Treaty is once-in-a-generation opportunity to end Plastic Pollution. We absolutely need to ‘turn off the tap’ by upstream actions to reduce plastic production, but we also need to ‘stop the bath-tub overflowing’ through proper waste management.
This is not a ‘cop out’ for the plastics producers – they are responsible for the high plastics content in municipal solid waste in lower income countries, which cannot afford proper management; so it is their responsibility to ensure that their wastes are collected and recycled properly and to pay all of the associated costs. The scientific part of the Tearfund report shows that extending municipal solid waste collection and controlled recovery and disposal to services to all (95% on SDG indicator 11.6.1) would not only address a major public health and environmental crisis impacting billions worldwide, but also reduce macroplastics dispersal to the environment (and thus available for onward transport to the ocean) by 77% and open burning by 90% . So, let’s make sure that is done!
UPDATE. The report puts forward a fit-for-purpose text on waste management for negotiators. The initial report was issued prior to the negotiation meeting INC-4 in Ottawa from 23-29 April 2024. A second edition was issued in September, to provide specific inputs to the final text negotiations which should have been concluded at INC-5 in Busan 25 November – 1 December 2024.
UPDATE. The modelling for this report by Costas Velis, Ed Cook and Josh Cottam of the University of Leeds used their SPOT model. Their seminal paper showing that uncollected municipal solid waste accounts for 85% of uncontrolled macroplastic dispersal to the environment was published in Nature in September 2024.
1 March, 2024 | Publication, Resource and waste management
As lead author of UNEP and ISWA’s original Global Waste Management Outlook (GWMO) in 2015, and a contributing author to the long-awaited follow-up, I am thrilled to welcome the publication at UNEA-6 this week of GWMO 2024: Beyond an age of waste – Turning rubbish into a resource. Warm congratulations to the lead author, Zoë Lenkiewicz, who has written a concise and engaging report which will hopefully succeed in placing municipal solid waste management firmly where it belongs on the local and international political agenda.
Zoe has summed it up brilliantly in the 300 character summary on the back cover of the easy-to-skim-read 80-page report: ‘The Global Waste Management Outlook 2024 echoes the 2015 Global Waste Management Outlook’s call to action to scale up efforts to prevent waste generation; to extend adequate, safe and affordable municipal solid waste management to everyone worldwide; and to ensure that all unavoidable waste is managed safely.’ My thanks and congratulations to the patient project managers, Daniel Ternald of UNEP and Aditi Ramola of ISWA.
12 December, 2023 | Publication, Waste and resource management
My magnum opus that I’ve been working for the last 5 years has now been published. This uses my own experiences and analytical tools to review the historical evolution of waste and resource management since the first environmental legislation back in the 1970s when I first started working as a consultant in the sector. I then draw on my more recent international policy work to reflect on priorities and challenges over the next decade. My basic thesis is that we need to understand how the sector has evolved in the recent past to plan confidently for the future. I hope it will be widely read, not least to avoid ‘reinventing the wheel’; which is why I have published open access, as part of the 40th anniversary celebrations of ISWA’s peer-reviewed journal Waste Management & Research, rather than as a shiny book sitting behind a paywall.
The full title is: ‘Learning from the Past to Plan for the Future: an Historical Review of the Evolution of Waste and Resources Management 1970-2020 and Reflections on Priorities 2020-2030 – the Perspective of an Involved Witness’. The scope includes both municipal solid wastes (MSW) and hazardous wastes; the journey from end-of-pipe waste management, through the 3Rs (reduce, reuse, recycle) to the circular economy; and the continuing struggles of many developing countries to take even the early steps to bring their wastes under control. Despite impressive progress, around 2.7 billion people worldwide lack access to waste collection; while ~40% of collected MSW is open dumped or burned – a continuing global waste emergency.
So, much remains to be done. Three policy priorities are critical for all countries: access to sustainable financing; rethinking sustainable recycling; and worldwide EPR (extended producer responsibility) with teeth. Extending services to unserved communities (SDG11.6.1) requires a people centred approach, working with communities to provide both quality services and decent livelihoods for collection and recycling workers. Two current opportunities to make real progress are provided by negotiations on an international legally binding instrument to end plastic pollution – extending waste collection and controlled disposal to all would halve the weight of plastics entering the oceans; and on a science-policy panel on chemicals, waste and pollution prevention, modeled on the IPCC for climate change. We need to grasp this ‘once in a lifetime’ opportunity.
28 November, 2023 | Climate mitigation, Publication, Resource and waste management
ISWA are hosting the first ever Waste and Resources Pavilion at COP28 in Dubai. My contribution is an article, co-authored with the ISWA President Carlos Silva Filho and Technical Director Aditi Ramola, where we challenge the common perception that waste and resource management contributes minimally to mitigation of climate heating. We argue that is simply WRONG, and one can have high confidence that the sector’s potential is significant. Whatever the actual number, action is needed now: it is imperative that better waste and resource management is prioritised in climate action plans and nationally determined contributions.
