8 April, 2012 | Waste Management
Sustainable solid waste management (SWM) is a challenge to most local and national governments in developing countries. The German Technical Cooperation Agency – GIZ has recently launched a 3-year programme to develop pilot projects and guidance materials to fill specific gaps in the knowledge base on sustainable SWM. The study focusing on the delivery of waste management services (‘operator models’) has been commissioned to ERM and Wasteaware – Professor David C Wilson is global advisor and lead analyst in the project team.
UPDATE 03 March 2014: The final Operator Model reports have now been published.
Past experience has shown that there is no such thing as ‘a standard operator model’. Contexts in which the various solid waste management systems exist and operate vary diversely. The team will collect and analyse case study experiences in various low- and middle-income countries and different areas along the waste chain to identify what works under which circumstances. The case studies will be analysed in terms of:
– What services are provided?
– Who provides those services and under what conditions?
– How are the services managed, supervised and paid for? and
– At what (geographical) level are the services provided?
The results will be presented in a ‘source book’ and guidance paper to assist decision-makers in selecting the most appropriate and efficient model (or mix of models) for service delivery in any particular local situation.
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 July, 2010 | Waste Management
Al Jazeera English News today ran a feature on the Zabbaleen, the informal waste recyclers in Cairo. After the video clip, Professor David C Wilson was interviewed live by videolink between the Doha and London studios, to discuss waste management in developing countries more generally. He highlighted the financial benefits that informal recyclers bring to a city, and argued for co-operative solutions – the city recognises the recyclers and works with them, to provide the recyclers with dignity, access to the waste and more hygienic working conditions,; and in turn benefits from more efficient recycling and thus less waste that the city needs to collect and dispose of.
The feature was part of a series on ‘Our Wasteful World’. The video clip highlights the very high recycling rates achieved in Cairo, but also the lack of recognition of the Zabbaleen by the authorities and the unhygienic and degrading working conditions. David Wilson pointed out that cities like Paris and London had similar, relatively efficient, largely informal closed-loop recycling systems in the 19th century; these were displaced by formal, municipal collection systems, introduced to protect public health by removing wastes from the cities; and more recently also by modern systems focusing on the environmental standards of waste disposal. Western countries have thus had to rebuild recycling almost from scratch over the last 10-20 years, at considerable cost to the public sector, whereas the original informal sector recycling systems still operate in most developing country cities. These systems both provide livelihoods to large numbers of the urban poor, whose priority is where the next meal will come from; and also recycle a sizeable % of municipal solid wastes, thus saving city governments $millions in avoided collection and disposal costs – in effect, the poor subsidising the rich.
8 February, 2009 | Waste Management
ISSOWAMA is a network for knowledge sharing, to promote the development and implementation of Integrated Sustainable Solid Waste Management in Asia. ISSOWAMA is funded by the European Commission as a coordination action under the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) and will run for 30 months. The 22 partner organisations met in Bangkok on 11-12 February 2009 for the kick-off meeting. Professor David C Wilson is participating in ISSOWAMA as an Associate of the Dutch not-for-profit foundation Waste.
ISSOWAMA seeks to improve the standards of solid waste management in Asia by promoting the concept of Integrated and Sustainable Waste Management (ISWM). The ISSOWAMA consortium includes 22 partner organisations from 8 Asian developing countries and 4 European countries, plus the International Soild Waste Association (ISWA), and will form the core of a wider expertise and knowledge sharing network. The concept https://samtech.edu/cheap-cialis/ of ISWM was first developed by the Collaborative Working Group on Waste Management in Low- and Middle- Income Countries (CWG) in 1996, and has been further developed, inter alia, by Waste for whom DCW is working as a member of the ISSOWAMA consortium.
