4 December, 2025 | Waste Management
WHO is launching a new global report, “Throwing away our health: The impacts of solid waste on human health.” Join the launch webinar on 16 Dec 2025, 13:00–14:00 UTC / GMT. DCW was pleased to advise on and review this important report and will join the panel discussion at the launch.
Formal municipal solid waste (MSW) management services were introduced in 19th century cities to protect public health. This report is a timely reminder of the continuing importance of that role, drawing attention in particular to the continuing public health risks where municipal solid wastes are not collected (UNEP/ISWA GWMO: 2.7 billion people without waste collection) and/or when they are open dumped or burned (~40% of global MSW collected). The report brings together current knowledge on how solid waste can impact health in both the global south and the global north; where the evidence is still missing; and what the health sector can do to drive change.
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.
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.
1 March, 2024 | Publication, Resource and waste management
As lead author of UNEP and ISWA’s original Global Waste Management Outlook (GWMO) in 2015, and a contributing author to the long-awaited follow-up, I am thrilled to welcome the publication at UNEA-6 this week of GWMO 2024: Beyond an age of waste – Turning rubbish into a resource. Warm congratulations to the lead author, Zoë Lenkiewicz, who has written a concise and engaging report which will hopefully succeed in placing municipal solid waste management firmly where it belongs on the local and international political agenda.
Zoe has summed it up brilliantly in the 300 character summary on the back cover of the easy-to-skim-read 80-page report: ‘The Global Waste Management Outlook 2024 echoes the 2015 Global Waste Management Outlook’s call to action to scale up efforts to prevent waste generation; to extend adequate, safe and affordable municipal solid waste management to everyone worldwide; and to ensure that all unavoidable waste is managed safely.’ My thanks and congratulations to the patient project managers, Daniel Ternald of UNEP and Aditi Ramola of ISWA.
3 March, 2022 | Publication, Resource and waste management
A key constraint to improving waste and resource management in many countries is a lack of access to investment finance. Extending waste collection to all and phasing out uncontrolled dumping and open burning in low-income countries would significantly cut the mass of plastics reaching the ocean. So the UNEP Finance Initiative publication Diving Deep, aimed at banks, insurers and institutional investors, is very welcome. Guidance is provided in the form of a science-based, actionable toolkit, to ensure that their investments, both in product manufacture and in waste management, encourage waste prevention and sound waste management, thus keeping plastics out of the oceans.
The promotional video and the document itself are worth looking at just for the wonderful images by world-renowned photographer Cristina Mittermeier of Sea Legacy. The guidance was prepared by WWF (led by Paula Chin) and RWA (led by Andy Whiteman). DCW played a small role as one of the reviewers.
