How little Official Development Finance goes to solid 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.
