Earth Today | Stop the waste

WITH GROWING waste generation a challenge to public health, the 2024 Waste Management Outlook, a report of the United Nations Environment Programme, has suggested that zero waste and circular economy strategies must be implemented to safeguard a liveable future.

“Urgent change is needed to prevent the costs of waste spiralling out of control. All stakeholders – public, private and civil society – must work together to reduce waste, reduce its complexity, and reduce the leakage of legacy pollutants into the environment,” said the report, titled ‘Beyond an age of waste: Turning rubbish into a resource’.

“Materials need to be kept in use for as long as possible and at their highest possible value. Recyclability and accountability need to increase. Waste crime must fall,” it added.

According to the report, more than two billion tonnes of municipal solid waste is generated each year, making it is necessary to act with urgency to arrest the problem. At the same time, the health of people and of nature hangs in the balance, as “between 400,000 and one million people die every year as a result of diseases related to mismanaged waste that includes diarrhoea, malaria, heart disease and cancer”.

At the same time, “indiscriminate waste disposal practices can introduce hazardous chemicals into soil, water bodies and the air, causing long-term, potentially irreversible damage to local flora and fauna, negatively impacting biodiversity, harming entire ecosystems, and entering the human food chain”.

“Uncontrolled waste knows no national borders. It is carried by waterways across and between countries, while emissions from the burning and open dumping of waste are deposited in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and in the atmosphere. Pollution from waste is associated with a range of adverse health and environmental effects, many of which will last for generations,” the report cautioned.

It is against this background that it has championed individual and collective actions by a variety of stakeholders. In doing their part, the report said development banks, donors and philapthropic entities can, among other things, openly share lessons learnt to replicate successes and avoid the repetition of failures, while also taking into account the track record of a particular solution when assessing proposals, “so that the most effective approaches are those that receive the greatest support”.

National governments, it said, can “legislate for the waste hierarchy; pursue all opportunities to encourage waste reduction and circular economy initiatives at a national and sub-national level, for example, by introducing incentives for zero-waste service delivery models, and modulated fees that promote waste reduction in producer responsibility schemes”.

This is while municipalities cooperate and share good practices and involve local communities to ensure “systems are co-designed with service users to promote ownership and accountability and to embed behaviour change”.

Producers and regulators, players from the waste management sector and citizens all have roles to play as well – from pursuing business models that achieve financial savings through resource efficiency, such as refill, deposit return and design-for-recycling to designing systems that are “locally appropriate, ft-for-purpose and future-proofed, ensuring they do not lock in linear resource use and can be adapted to meet the changing needs of society.

As for citizens, the report encouraged “conscious consumerism, buying only what is needed and avoiding goods that are over-packaged, unnecessarily single-use or have a short lifespan; use refill and deposit return schemes where they exist”.

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