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.
22 October, 2024 | Waste Management
To tackle the on-going global waste emergency, with billions of people around the world still lacking basic services for solid waste collection and controlled recovery and disposal, it is important to know how much international development assistance, or Official Development Finance (ODF), has been directed to this issue. Our paper analysing two decades of data has now been published: the results are frankly shocking – it’s not how much? – but rather how little?
David Lerpiniere has worked on and off for 10 years on this rigorous but pain-staking project, requiring the manual assessment of some 10,000 project records to extract data on the SWM component. The results show that, yes, the $ amounts and the % share have increased over 20 years, but at 0.4% of the total is still an order of magnitude below the average 3% over the period 2015-2030 called for in UNEP and ISWA’s first Global Waste Management Outlook (GWMO) to extend collection services and controlled recovery and disposal to 95% of the world’s population, i.e. to meet SDG indictor 11.6.1. To add insult to injury, funding has mainly gone to relatively more developed countries middle-income countries, with just 8% of the limited SWM pot going to the low-income countries who need it the most. This paper provides the peer-reviewed evidence: now is the time for ACTION.
Full reference: Lerpiniere, D.J., Wilson, D.C., & Velis, C.A. (2025). Official development finance in solid waste management reveals insufficient resources for tackling plastic pollution: A global analysis of two decades of data. Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 212, 107918.
27 August, 2017 | Conference
The German Development Bank KfW’s annual international Development Finance Forum will this year focus on the world’s oceans: Oceans 21 -Solutions for a sustainable marine future. Professor David C Wilson has been invited as the opening keynote speaker on one of the three parallel strands of the Forum, focusing on marine litter and marine plastics. The working hypothesis is that avoiding marine litter requires predominantly measures to reduce land-based sources, and of these the largest contributor by weight is inadequate solid waste management in low and middle income countries. DCW will suggest that extending waste collection to all, and eliminating open dumping of wastes, in these countries would likely reduce plastics entering the oceans by more than half. More details will follow the Forum, which is to be held in Frankfurt on 21-22 November 2017.https://corazoninc.com/cialis-cheap-20mg/
