CONCEPTS AND
9. Geographical
2.4 AN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK FOR THE GWMO
A number of assessment methods have been developed for or adapted to waste management systems. The principal analytical tools used in the GWMO are briefly introduced here.
2.4.1 Integrated sustainable waste management (ISWM)
Developing a waste management system is complex. Experience suggests that, for a system to be sustainable in the long term, consideration needs to be given to:
• All the physical elements (infrastructure) of the system, from waste generation through storage, collection, transport, transfer, recycling, recovery, treatment and disposal.
• All the stakeholders (actors) involved, including municipalities; regional and national governments; waste generators/service users (including industry, business, institutions and households); producers (those who put products on the market which become waste at the end of their life, including manufacturers, brand owners, importers and others in the supply chain); service providers (whether public or private sector, formal or informal, large or small); civil society and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) (which play a variety of roles, including facilitating the participation of other parties); international agencies; etc.
• All the strategic aspects, including the political, health, institutional, social, economic, financial, environmental and technical facets.
The term integrated waste management has been widely used with a variety of meanings,17 but often refers only to integration across the physical elements. The concept of integrated sustainable waste management
16 For data on recycling rates, see Figure 3.13 in Section 3.5. For further discussion of informal sector recycling, including common occupational health risks, see Topic Sheet 14 on the Informal Waste Sector, following Section 4.7.
17 Integrated Solid Waste Management was mentioned in the UNEP’s Governing Council Decision GC 24/5 (2007) and again in GC 25/8 (2009). Past usages of the terms
‘integrated waste management’ and ‘integrated solid waste management’ are classified in Table 1 of Wilson et al. (2013). See http://www.icevirtuallibrary.com/content/
article/10.1680/warm.12.00005
(ISWM),18 which explicitly brings together all three dimensions, is gradually becoming the norm in discussion of solid waste management in developing countries. In the GWMO, the primary analytical framework used is a simplified form of ISWM, first developed for UN-Habitat’s Solid Waste Management in the World’s Cities (2010). This is shown schematically in Figure 2.3 as two overlapping ‘triangles’.
The first triangle in Figure 2.3 comprises the three primary physical components (elements), each linked to one of the key drivers identified in Figure 2.2. These provide the necessary infrastructure for solid waste management:
1. Waste collection: driven primarily by public health;
2. Waste treatment and disposal: driven primarily by environmental protection; and
3. The 3Rs – reduce, reuse, recycle: driven by the resource value of the waste and more recently by ‘closing the loop’ in order to return both materials and nutrients to beneficial use.
The second triangle focuses on the ‘softer’ aspects of ISWM – the governance strategies:
4. Inclusivity of stakeholders: focusing in particular on service users and service providers;
5. Financial sustainability: requiring the system to be cost-effective, affordable and well financed; and 6. Sound institutions and proactive policies: including both the national policy framework and local institutions.
An integrated and sustainable waste managment system must address all technical (infrastructure) and governance aspects to allow a well-functioning system that works sustainably over the long term.
As previous publications have tended to have a more technical focus, the GWMO has chosen to focus primarily on issues of governance and finance.
Figure 2.3 The integrated sustainable waste management (ISWM) framework used in the GWMO
Physical Governance
1. Public health –
collection 6. Sound institutions
& pro-active policies
3. Resource value – Reduce, Reuse, Recycle (3Rs)
2. Environment – Treatment and disposal
5. Financial – Sustainability
4. Inclusivity – User and provider W: Waste
related data
➜
B:Background information
➜
Notes: This is a simplified version of the original ISWM concept and was first devised for UN-Habitat.19 The numbers and letters in this version of the Figure20 cross-refer to the ‘Wasteaware’ benchmark indicator set, which is built around this framework and introduced in Section 2.5.3 below.
2.4.2 Life-cycle analysis (LCA) and other assessment tools
Traditional ‘end-of-pipe’ waste management focuses on just one segment of the life-cycle of materials and products, namely, after the point of discard. In contrast, the GWMO takes into account the wider issues of waste and resource management across the product life-cycle. Life-Cycle Thinking (LCT) is a well-established concept which aims to provide a holistic view of all the environmental, social and economic impacts that could
18 ISWM was first developed in the 1990s by the Dutch NGO WASTE and the Collaborative Working Group on Solid Waste Management in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (known as CWG). See Annex A, Chapter 2, Integrated sustainable waste management.
19 See Scheinberg, Wilson, Rodic (2010) in Annex A, Chapter 1, Waste management.
20 Wilson et al. (2013).
Background, definitions, concepts and indicators 31
possibly occur during a product’s lifetime.21 Life-Cycle Assessment or Analysis (LCA) is a set of tools to quantify these impacts through the entire lifecycle. The traditional use of LCA was to compare products, with a relatively limited focus on end-of-life impacts. Recently, there has been a push to extend the scope systematically to explore resource and waste management.22
LCA is just one of an ever-growing set of assessment methods23 to support decisions regarding waste and resource management. Both LCT and ISWM could be seen as specific applications of a systems approach.
Another tool used in the GWMO is Materials Flow Analysis (MFA), which can be used, for example, to produce national-level accounts of material and resource flows through the economy, and to prepare a mass balance of a city’s waste and resource management system.
The results of an LCA can be used to arrange the available management options for a specific type of waste into a priority order. A simple and often used rule of thumb is the waste management hierarchy, which provides a generalized priority order for waste management options and technical approaches. Waste policy initiatives are often framed in terms of ‘moving waste management up the hierarchy’, which as a general principle has widespread acceptance. The hierarchy can be stated in many different ways, and the specifics of the generalized priority order are themselves hotly debated.24 The version appearing in Figure 2.4 was agreed by the parties to the Basel Convention,25 who further stated that the hierarchy ‘encourage[s] treatment options that deliver the best overall environmental outcome, taking into account life-cycle thinking’.
A detailed comparison of options in any specific context requires a detailed LCA, because the option considered
‘better’ can vary depending on the precise questions asked and the particular local circumstances at play. It follows that different versions of the hierarchy could be constructed for use in different contexts. For example, in developing countries a major priority is often to phase out uncontrolled disposal (open dumping or burning) in order to get onto the hierarchy in the first place. Figure 2.4 recognizes this by showing ‘uncontrolled disposal’
below the hierarchy, and an intermediate step of ‘controlled landfill’ below the bottom rung of the hierarchy itself, which in the EU would be taken to equate to ‘state-of-the-art’ landfill meeting high technical standards.
Also, the hierarchy leaves out some of the early steps in the waste management chain, including waste storage and collection. Extending collection to the entire population for the protection of public health continues to be a major priority in many developing countries.
So, the GWMO does make use of the waste management hierarchy, but at the same time, it recognizes its limitations.
Figure 2.4 Waste management hierarchy
Prevention
Reuse Recycling Other recovery including
energy recovery Landfill Controlled
disposal Uncontrolled disposal Minimization
Note: This version of the hierarchy prepared for the GWMO. Please see the caveats in footnote 23 below. The sequence of steps is based on that agreed by the parties to the Basel Convention (see footnote 24)
21 http://www.lifecycleinitiative.org/starting-life-cycle-thinking/what-is-life-cycle-thinking/
22 See Annex A, Chapter 2, LCA and other assessment tools for waste and resource management.
23 See Annex A as above, which includes recent reviews by Allesch & Brunner (2014) and Zurbrügg et al. (2014).
24 The applicability of the waste hierarchy has been questioned in a world where resource recovery involves global value chains, as it refers only to environmental aspects and not to public or occupational health, financial or other considerations such as materials criticality. Some current research efforts aim to supplement or replace it with more sophisticated tools.
25 Basel Convention, COP10 2011 - Decision BC-10/2: Strategic framework for the implementation of the Basel Convention for 2012–2021. Annex Item II, Guiding Principles, point a.