8 November, 2012 | Publication
One of Professor David C Wilson’s long-standing research interests at Imperial College is the contribution made to solid waste management (SWM) in developing country cities by the often large informal recycling sector (IRS). This autumn has seen a flurry of activity. The leading French newspaper Le Monde ran a feature article by Gilles van Kotte on the importance of the IRS on 01 September 2012, including an interview with DCW. A major paper presented at the ISWA Annual Congress in September sets out a framework for professionalisation and integration of the IRS into SWM systems. DCW made a presentation to an Agence Française de Développement (AFD) conference in October, on the role of the role of public-private partnerships in SWM in developing countries, including that of the IRS. And DCW chaired an invited workshop in November to discuss partnerships between global producers of consumer goods and the IRS, to achieve product stewardship goals in developing countries.
Many developing country cities aspire to modern waste management systems, which are associated with relatively high recycling rates of clean, source separated materials. Most already have informal sector recycling systems, which are driven solely by the revenues derived from selling recovered materials, even though they are saving the formal sector money by reducing waste quantities. There is clear potential for ‘win-win’ solutions, which increase recycling rates, protect people’s livelihoods, improve working conditions and reduce child labour, bring the recyclers within the formal economy, and reduce further the overall costs of waste management for the formal sector.
DCW is currently leading work on the IRS for the International Solid Waste Association (ISWA)’s Task Force on Waste and Globalisation, which is aiming both to make the case for, and also to provide guidance on how to achieve, such professionalisation and integration. The ISWA Congress paper, presented on 18 September and published in an open-access special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Waste Management & Research, sets out an analytical framework for selecting a set of interventions which is appropriate in a particular local situation. Possible interventions are grouped into four categories: one of these focuses on organisation and capacity building of the IRS; while the other three are the interfaces between the IRS and the formal SWM system, the materials and value chain, and society as a whole. The recommendation is that IRS professionalisation and integration initiatives should consider all four categories in a balanced way, and pay increased attention to their interdependencies which are central to success, including specific actions such as the IRS having access to source separated waste and to microfinance.
DCW was invited to present at the AFD conference in Paris on 25 October by PROPARCO, which promotes private sector investment in development. A special issue of their journal Private Sector & Development, on Waste: the challenges facing developing countries,was launched at the conference.
The Product Stewardship – Informal Sector Forum in Berlin on 14-15 November was hosted by the German Technical Co-operation AgencyGIZ, and organised for them by the consultancies RWA and Waste.
Extended producer responsibility (EPR) was developed in Europe as a policy tool, aiming to transfer the responsibility and costs of managing post-consumer product waste back from the local authorities to the ‘producer’ or supply-chain which provided the original product. The aim of this informal forum was to exchange and develop practical, workable ideas for sustainable, inclusive product stewardship in middle-income countries, where the existing recyclers are largely in the informal sector.
8 September, 2012 | Publication
Waste prevention is a current policy priority for governments across Europe. It is thus timely that Professor David C Wilson has published a seminal paper, which he also presented at the ISWA Annual Congress last week, reviewing the international evidence base on business waste prevention, in order to underpin policy making. DCW managed the original review on behalf of Defra, the English Environment Ministry, the work being undertaken by a consortium comprising Oakdene Hollins, Brook Lyndhurst and the Resource Recovery Forum.
The paper written by DCW and co-authors was presented at the International Solid Waste association (ISWA)’s Annual Congress in Florence on 18 September, and is published in an open-access special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Waste Management & Research. The papersummarises the scale and benefits of business waste prevention; categorises waste prevention initiatives into four approaches; presents a conceptual framework and uses that to analyse attitudes and behaviours; and providess selected examples to show the effectiveness of eight different types of policy intervention.
The original Defra project was published in February 2012. The results were presented for ease of use as 28 inter-linked modular reports. They can be accessed here (check on ‘search’ and enter ‘WR1403’ as the keyword). The results of the review were showcased at a Defra-WRAPworkshop on 29 February 2012, at which DCW chaired the morning evidence session.
Waste prevention is at the top of the waste hierarchy. The revised EUrevised Waste Framework Directive requires Member States to introduce a national Waste Prevention Programme by December 2013. DCW has been advising Defra (the English Environment Ministry) on their waste and resources evidence programme, and in particular on the evidence relating to waste prevention, since 2004.
The definition of waste prevention used in this evidence review of business waste follows the Directive, including waste avoidance, waste reduction at source or in process and product reuse – recycling is outside the scope. The search for evidence was very broad, covering UK and international, academic and ‘grey’, electronic and printed, and English, French and German language sources dating back at least to 1995. Almost 1,000 relevant documents were identified, of which nearly 600 passed initial screening.
The analysis followed the broad logic of waste prevention actions by business, starting from the basic drivers of legislation and competition. Central to any analysis of the evidence is a detailed examination of the attitudes and behaviours of business. The other two fundamental perspectives used in sorting and assembling the evidence were the particular commercial or industrial sector and the types of intervention to encourage action. A key analytical tool was to characterise the actions that a business can take to prevent waste into a number of approaches.
DCW also managed a previous Defra project, published in October 2009, which reviewed the available evidence on household waste prevention and received an internal Defra award for ‘excellence in the communication of science/engineering to policy makers’. This formed the basis of a special issue of the peer reviewed journal Waste Management & Research, published in March 2010, for which DCW co-wrote the guest editorial and co-authored four papers based on the Defra work.
8 August, 2012 | Publication
Professor David C Wilson is co-author of a research article: Resource management performance in Bahrain: a systematic analysis of municipal waste management, secondary material flows and organizational aspects, published in the August issue of Waste Management & Research, 30 (8) 813-824. The research was undertaken by one of his students, Maram Al Sabbagh, using the methodology for profiling waste management originally developed by DCW and colleagues for UN-Habitat. Bahrain fills a gap in both the geographical and income level coverage of the previous sample of 20 cities.
8 May, 2012 | Publication
Professor David C Wilson is co-author of two recently published original research articles on cost estimation and cost function analysis for waste management in developing countries. DCW has been working for several years as an external supervisor with Shantha Parthan, a PhD student at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Shantha’s research is on improved cost planning for municipal solid waste management in developing countries, where problems are severe, expectations for improvements are high, but finances are constrained.
One paper is Cost estimation for solid waste management in industrialising regions – Precedents, problems and prospects, published in the March 2012 issue of the journal Waste Management, 32(3) 584–594, which examines alternative approaches used in both industrialised and industrialising countries. The other is Cost function analysis for solid waste management: a developing country experience, published in the May 2012 issue of Waste Management & Research, 30(5) 485–491, which explores the potential use of cost functions, using as a case study an extensive data set covering some 300 Indian cities.
8 March, 2012 | Publication
Solid waste management has always suffered from a lack of consistent and reliable data to compare progress between countries. So the publication today of a seminal research paper, Comparative analysis of solid waste management in 20 cities, written by Professor David C Wilson and 4 co-authors in the peer-reviewed journal Waste Management & Research, represents a major step forward. The World Bank website is still reporting low collection coverage and a prevalence of open dumping in all developing countries: the new data analysed here shows that significant progress has been made over the last decade, with levels of both collection coverage and controlled disposal above 90% in most middle-income developing countries.
This comparative analysis uses the comprehensive and consistent dataset collected for 20 reference cities, developed and developing, in all 6 inhabited continents, for the 2010 UN-Habitat book . The paper was written by DCW; with his two co-authors from the original book, Dr Ljiljana Rodic of the University of Wageningen who led the city data collection and Dr Anne Scheinberg of WASTE; Dr Costas Velis of Imperial College, who carried out the statistical analysis; and Dr Graham Alabaster, who initiated the original work for UN-Habitat.
The paper presents comparative data for waste arisings per capita and waste composition; for the three physical elements of a waste management system – collection, disposal and recycling; and for the main governance factors – both user and provider inclusivity, financial sustainability and sound institutions/ proactive policy. The conclusions stress that there is no ‘one size fits all’: rather, each city needs to develop its own locally sustainable solution, identifying what already works well and building on that, and addressing both the technical and the governance issues.
Full data tables are available in the book, and in a previous paper to the WASTE 2010 conference. A more descriptive account of the 20 cities was published in the proceedings of the ISWA 2010 conference in Hamburg.
Update July 2012: The conclusions in the paper regarding the recent progress that has been achieved, particularly in middle-income countries, are reinforced by a new World Bank report, which gives average collection coverage of 86% in upper-middle, 68% in lower-middle, and 41% in low-income countries – these figures are considerably lower than our 2009 data; they come from a much larger sample size, but are somewhat older, with a median date of 2001.
8 February, 2012 | Publication
Prof David C Wilson is the scientific co-ordinator for the ISWA Task Force which has been tasked to report to the 2012 World Congress in Florence on a number of major challenges posed to the long-term sustainability of waste management by increasing globalisation. He is also co-leading, with his Imperial College colleague Dr Costas Velis, the Task Force’s work on the informal recycling sector in developing countries, which is one of his long-standing research interests. This part of the work kicked-off with an international workshop in Buenos Aires, held alongside the ISWA Beacon Conference on Waste Prevention and Recycling, on 21-23 June, 2011. November 2012 update: A July 2012 progress report, a general paper and a peer-reviewed paper on the informal sector integration work were all published for the Florence Conference. An update on DCW’s informal sector related activities is also available.
The impacts of globalisation on waste management are a major concern for the International Solid Wastes Association (ISWA), bringing new and unprecedented challenges for the long-term sustainability of both material resources and society. Recognising these substantial changes for solid waste management, ISWA established the Globalisation and Waste Management (GWM) Task Force (TF) in September 2010. The TF aims to examine and make recommendations on a range of issues arising from the interaction between globalisation and waste management, including for example the dependence of Europe and North America on exporting materials to Asia for recycling in order to sustain their high recycling rates. The TF will present its interim findings to the ISWA World Congress in Florence in September 2012.
One focus for the ISWA GWM TF is to investigate and address the issues around informal sector waste management activities. Many developing country cities aspire to modern waste management systems, a key feature of which is their high recycling rates of clean, source separated materials, driven in large part by the need to find a cost-effective alternative to expensive anddifficult to site waste treatment and disposal facilities. Most low-income cities already have informal sector recycling systems, which are driven solely by the revenues derived from selling recovered materials, even though they are saving the formal sector money by reducing waste quantities. There is clear potential for ‘win-win’ co-operation between the formal and informal sectors, as providing support to the informal sector, to build recycling rates and to address some of the social issues, could reduce the overall costs of waste management for the formal sector.
This part of the work kicked-off with an international workshop onIntegrating informal sector recyclers into waste management in developing countries, which was held in Buenos Aires, alongside the ISWA Beacon Conference on Waste Prevention and Recycling, 21-23 June, 2011. The opening presentation by Costas Velis and DCW explored global experiences, and looked at Key steps towards effective inclusion in 21st century SWM systems. They also gave a keynote presentation at a Clinton Global Initiative meeting on the Informal Waste Sector in New York on 19 September 2011, entitled: Informal sector recycling at the crossroads – challenges of stakeholder systems. Click here to see a November 2012 update on progress.
