WHAT A WASTE

Report paints picture of how to rein in cost of rubbish

THERE IS a cost to manage the more than two billion tonnes of municipal solid waste people generate each year; and it’s expensive.

In fact, data from the latest Global Waste Management Outlook put the price tag for the management of municipal solid waste at US$252.3 billion globally in 2020. Municipal solid waste is generated wherever people live, as they buy, use and get rid of things.

“The most expensive step in the waste management chain is usually collection, with crew wages, vehicle fuel and maintenance, insurance, and other indirect costs to be covered,” explained the 2024 report, published by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

“Recycling requires sorting and processing infrastructure, together with funds for ongoing operational costs. Waste disposal facilities such as engineered landfills and waste-to-energy plants require significant up-front investments in infrastructure,” it added.

The costs extend to high operational and maintenance costs.

“Even the open dumping of waste has direct costs, with fires needing to be extinguished and land value being lost,” the report noted.

There is, too, the cost for the mismanagement of waste, as readily seen in communities disproportionately affected by poor environmental quality, “particularly waste workers and citizens in lower-income countries and small island developing states”.

The high cost of upgrading infrastructure, together with limited influence or control over product design, such as the choice of material and “design for longevity, reuse or recycling” also factor into the cost.

Also at play, the report said, is “limited capacity and technical capability to deal with fast-growing waste streams” and the “inability to hold polluters to account, either through enforcing environmental regulations or through market mechanisms, such as extended producer responsibility”.

‘Extended producer responsibility’ is about a producer taking responsibility for a product up to the waste stage of that product’s lifecycle – from collection to final disposal.

CIRCULAR ECONOMY

The solution, the UNEP report seemed to insist, is a move towards zero waste and the transition to a circular economy.

“To achieve the circular economy scenario (bringing waste generation back to 2020 levels), regions such as North America, Australia and New Zealand, and most of Europe will need to dramatically reduce resourceintensive consumption and waste generation,” the report said. “In other regions where increasing economic growth, urbanisation and industrialisation are anticipated, maintaining current waste generation l evels will also require significant waste-prevention measures,” it added. “The circular economy scenario will require economic growth to be entirely decoupled from resource use, with government policies and producer actions fully aligned. Investments i n recycling will need to be even more significant, with a three-fold increase in global capacity to recycle municipal solid waste, from around 400 million tonnes in 2020 to more than 1.2 billion tonnes in 2050,”the report said further.

Meanwhile, the benefits of that scenario, the report predicted, are significant. “Realistically, the only way to prevent runaway waste management costs is to implement the circular economy scenario, in which 2050 costs will be similar to today’s but with vastly better environmental performance,” it said.

“Working towards achieving the waste management under control and circular economy scenarios could offset external costs with gains: a more liveable climate, healthier ecosystems and millions of new jobs created in the transition to a circular economy. These gains would be likely to grow at an increasing rate as circular business models become more mainstream,”it added, drawing on the work of the International Labour Organization.