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.
10 November, 2023 | Publication, Waste Management
ISWA has published my blog that makes the evidence-based case for bringing waste management onto the main agenda of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) for the proposed international treaty to end plastics pollution; the third INC meeting is in Nairobi 13-17 November 2023. Much of the focus of negotiations is rightly on plastics reduction and circularity. But a necessary parallel component is sound waste management and plastics leakage prevention. It is not a case of one or the other – both are necessary and complementary.
Of course the goal is the 3Rs of reduce, reuse and recycle, restricting the need for sound management to a small fraction of residual plastics waste. But it is also critical to stem the current catastrophic flow of plastics into the environment and the oceans. Extending municipal solid waste collection to all and phasing out uncontrolled dumping and open burning (thus meeting SDG indicator 11.6.1) would halve plastics leakage to the oceans and cut by more than 90% open burning of plastics waste.
Progress towards that target needs to be stepwise – the Zero Draft published in advance of INC-3 makes the mistake of multiplying together three separate indicators into one aggregate indicator, which would run counter to current implementation of the SDGs and introduce a major disincentive to stepwise progress in the least developed countries. The major constraints currently are lack of political will and the mismatch of local costs versus global benefits. The plastics treaty can contribute positively both through making international ‘plastics finance’ available; and by instituting a mechanism for regional or even global negotiation and implementation of proper EPR (extended producer responsibility) ‘with teeth’. Not only does waste management need to be on the main agenda of the INC, but the focus needs to be on improving management of all municipal and related solid wastes, rather than attempting to consider plastic wastes in isolation.
16 March, 2023 | Publication, Resource and waste management, Waste Management
Our new open access paper tests and confirms for the first time the long-standing hypothesis that both the rate of municipal solid waste (MSW) generation in a city, and the performance of its MSW management system, depends on its level of socio-economic development level. We prepared the first consistent and comprehensive dataset for 40 cities around the world and used state-of-the-art statistical and machine learning techniques to correlate Wasteaware Cities Benchmark Indicators (WABI) with a broad range of explanatory socio-economic indices (including Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Social Progress Index (SPI) and Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI).
The results indicate that progress in collection coverage, and controlled recovery and disposal, has already taken place in low- and middle-income cities, although improvements in service quality often lag improvements in service coverage. However, the elephant in the room is that if we continue with ‘business as usual’ development, waste generation per capita and the total quantities (and cost) of waste management services will substantially increase. We urgently need to find new approaches to decoupling waste generation from economic growth and social progress.
The paper is open access and can be downloaded free of charge. It has taken a long time in preparation: thanks to my co-authors Costas Velis, Yoni Gavish, Sue M Grimes and Andrew Whiteman.
21 September, 2022 | Waste Management
It is indeed nice to have your work recognised! My co-authors Andy Whiteman and Mike Webster will receive the 2022 ISWA Publication Award this week at the ISWA World Congress Gala Dinner in Singapore, for our conceptual framework and global theory of waste and development, The Nine Development Bands. The 9DBs was published open access last year and is a powerful addition to the practitioner’s toolkit, bringing depth and nuance to understanding waste and resource management systems globally and helping you to focus your time and resources on achieving maximum impact. I am proud of all five of my ISWA Publication Awards over the last 20 years!
My previous ISWA Publications Awards were:
2015: ‘Wasteaware’ benchmark indicators for integrated sustainable waste management in cities. With Ljiljana Rodic, Mike Cowing, Costas Velis, Andy Whiteman, Anne Scheinberg, Recaredo Vilches, Darragh Masterson, Joachim Stretz and Barbara Oelz.
2013: An analytical framework and tool (‘InteRa’) for integrating the informal recycling sector in waste and resource management systems in developing countries. With Costas Velis, Ondina Rocca, Stephen Smith, Antonis Mavropoulos and Chris Cheeseman.
2010: Solid Waste Management in the World’s Cities. With Anne Scheinberg and Ljiljana Rodic.
2002: Training Resource Pack for Hazardous Wastes in Economically Developing Countries. With Fritz Balkau and Maggie Thurgood.
21 March, 2022 | Climate mitigation, Publication, Waste Management
I am pleased that the RICS Land Journal has published online an updated version of my article on the untapped potential for the waste and resource management sector to act as an enabler to unlock significant climate mitigation benefits across the economy. My best estimate of the mitigation potential is at least 15-20% of global carbon dioxide (equivalent) emissions, which is far beyond the IPCC’s estimate of 3% for the narrowly defined end-of-the linear-economy ‘waste’ sector, which is necessarily used in official climate reporting to avoid double counting.
This post supercedes that titled ‘COP26 and the waste and resource sector’, first published on 25 October 2022:
How much can better waste and resource management contribute to mitigating global heating? Prof David C Wilson addressed this question at the Policy Connect Sustainable Resource Forum seminar on October 11 2021. The answer with a high level of confidence is ‘significantly’, perhaps 15-20% of global carbon dioxide (equivalent) emissions. DCW has now written this up as a ‘thought piece’, making the case for prioritising actions at COP26 and beyond to improve waste and resource management and move towards the circular economy. This may be found as both an article and as a video interview on WasteAid’s COP26 online hub; as a feature on CIWM’s Circular Online; and as an ISWA guest blog.
1 December, 2021 | Publication, Waste Management
DCW was sent a copy of Practical Action’s new report ‘Managing Our Wastes 2021’ a few weeks ago and invited to write an endorsement for it. Having read and reviewed it, I was happy to do so; the report was launched today in a webinar hosted by UN-Habitat. The full text of what I wrote appears after the foreword by Practical Action’s Patron, Prince Charles.
‘Solid waste management is the ‘Cinderella’ among the essential utility services. Despite the crisis of some 40 per cent of the world’s population having no access, it has received very limited attention from either international agencies or mainstream development charities. I have been supporting Practical Action for nearly 50 years, so I warmly welcome this important new report which fills that gap. Most development work tackles the issue from the ‘top down’, and often focuses on (large scale) infrastructure. Much of my work over the last 25 years has focused on expanding performance assessment and planning of SWM systems in developing countries to include governance (including stakeholder inclusivity) alongside technical aspects; and to consider the often ‘informal’ recycling sector alongside ‘formal’ municipal waste management. Practical Action has taken that one step further, to strengthen the ‘bottom-up’, people-centred aspects. Sustainable waste and resource management needs to work for the poorest people, providing both a quality service which keeps slum areas clean and healthy, and a decent livelihood for the multitude of workers who deliver collection and recycling services. Both the revised assessment methods, the four insightful case studies and the four priority themes work well. I commend to you this important new manifesto to put people back at the centre of how we manage our solid wastes.’
Professor David C. Wilson. Visiting Professor in Resource and Waste Management, Imperial College London; Lead author of UNEP’s Global Waste Management Outlook
