World needs to integrate the principles of just transition to a circular economy to better manage waste, says lead author
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More than a third of the world’s population is drowning in waste, with over 2.7 billion people in the Global South and developing regions of the world not having their waste collected.
Two billion of the 2.7 billion live in rural areas, while 700,000 live in cities, a new United Nations report has found.
It also showed that an estimated 540 million tonnes of municipal solid waste, an equivalent of 27 per cent of the global total waste, is not being collected. Only 36 per cent and 37 per cent of the refuse generated in Sub-Saharan Africa and Central and South Asia respectively is being collected.
This is in sharp contrast to the situation in the developed and upper middle-income regions of the world where almost all of the waste is collected — between 83 per cent for the Caribbean and 99 per cent for North America.
The global average waste collection rate is 75 per cent, the report titled Turning rubbish into a resource: Global Waste Management Outlook 2024 (GWMO 2024) revealed.
It also predicted that waste generated was set to grow in volumes — from 2.3 billion tonnes in 2023 to 3.8 billion tonnes by 2050. This would worsen the burden of managing it.
“In 2020, the global direct cost of waste management was an estimated $252 billion. When factoring in the hidden costs of pollution, poor health and climate change from poor waste disposal practices, the cost rises to $361 billion,” said the document, launched during the Sixth United Nations Environmental Assembly (UNEA-6) at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya.
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“Without urgent action on waste management, by 2050 this global annual cost could almost double to a staggering $640.3 billion,” it added.
This can however be mitigated by management of the refuse and could potentially limit the net annual costs by 2050 to $270.2 billion, it observed.
It added:
Projections show that a circular economy model, where waste generation and economic growth are decoupled by adopting waste avoidance, sustainable business practices, and full waste management, could in fact lead to a full net gain of $108.5 billion per year.
The report provided the most substantial update on global waste generation and the cost of waste and its management since 2018, using life cycle assessments to explore what the world could gain or lose through continuing business-as-usual, adopting halfway measures, or committing fully to zero waste and circular economy societies.
According to lead author Zoë Lenkiewicz, no country in the world (including developed ones) had managed to ‘decouple’ development from waste generation so far, with the two going hand-in-hand always.
The waste continued to pose a threat to ecosystems and contribute to climate change. The threat from the refuse is predicted to double by 2050.
A rise to $640 billion in the cost of the refuse by 2050 clearly means that this is unaffordable for the world and it is time to take action against the acceleration.
“The message from this study is clear. We must now decide the kind of future that we want to pursue,” Lenkiewicz said.
She added that the world was largely ignoring the climate, health and economic impacts that came with waste. Key segments of society — notably women and the informal sector — were not being involved in making decisions on municipal waste, a major barrier in processing the refuse.
“Women are receptive to waste prevention measures while waste pickers are key to removal of waste and should not be forgotten,” Lenkiewicz noted.
She called for inclusive approaches that bring citizens on board in handling waste, noting with concern that shipping of waste around the world is a vice that has continued despite being a serious environmental crime.
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“We recommend that the world needs to integrate the principles of just transition to a circular economy in order to better manage waste, and note that many countries need to build their national expertise in waste management,” said Lenkiewicz.
Dealing with the menace of municipal waste will require addressing the whole value chain in production of various goods and commodities, with an emphasis on ‘upstream’ measures at manufacturing stage, as opposed to ‘downstream’ measures which involved managing waste, said UNEP’s Director of Industry and Economy Division Sheila Aggarwal-Khan.
This would mean an end to things like production of single-use plastic bags that is now the subject of ongoing negotiations for a global plastics treaty, she added.
In the interest of circularity, it would also involve things like companies producing more returnable containers as happened with some beverages.
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