Learning from the past to plan for the future: An historical review of the evolution of waste and resource management 1970–2020 and reflections on priorities 2020–2030 – The perspective of an involved witness

Abstract

Improving waste and resource management (WaRM) around the world can halve the weight of plastics entering the oceans, significantly mitigate global heating and contribute directly to 12 of 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs). Achieving such results demands understanding and learning from historical evolution of WaRM. The baseline is 1970, prior to environmental legislation. Early steps in the Global North focused on the ‘technical fix’ within strictly enforced legal frameworks, first bringing hazardous wastes and municipal solid wastes (MSW) under control, then gradually ramping up environmental standards. Using modern technologies to the Global South often failed due to institutional and financial constraints. From 1990, focus switched to integrating technical and governance aspects: local institutional coherence, financial sustainability, provider inclusivity, user inclusivity, national legislative and policy framework. The Global North rediscovered recycling, using policy measures to promote segregation at source; this relied on new markets in emerging economies, which had largely disappeared by 2020. The Global South is making progress on bringing wastes under control, but around 2.7 billion people lack access to waste collection, while ~40% of collected MSW is open dumped or burned – a continuing global waste emergency. So, much remains to be done to move further towards a circular economy. Three policy priorities are critical for all countries: access to sustainable financing, rethinking sustainable recycling and worldwide extended producer responsibility with teeth. Extending services to unserved communities (SDG11.6.1) requires a people-centred approach, working with communities to provide both quality services and decent livelihoods for collection and recycling workers.

Informal recycling sector contribution to plastic pollution mitigation: A systematic scoping review and quantitative analysis of prevalence and productivity

“…Evidence indicates the existence of an IRS going back several centuries (Velis et al, 2009) and it is likely that people have always sought to recover value from waste, even before modern concepts of informality existed. During the second half of the 20 th century, a relatively rapid increase in engineered materials placed on the market in the Global South outpaced the capability and capacity of governments to cope with the associated increased waste generation (Melosi, 1982;Wilson, 2023). Combined with rising unemployment and poverty, the contemporary IRS capitalised on these shortcomings, and converted them into an opportunity to improve their economic circumstances (van Zeeland, 2014).…”

“…4 million (Figure 2A), but with substantial differences (0.2-0.7% population) reported (Figure 2B). China's rapid attainment of economic prosperity in recent years (Ding et al, 2019) has come with and substantial improvements to its waste management system (Wilson, 2023;Xiao et al, 2023). Therefore, it is noteworthy that six of the data points for China, and one from Mongolia, are pre-2010, including two which report primary collector prevalence at >1% of the population.…”

Diagnosing the Causes of Failing Waste Collection in Belize, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Panama, and Paraguay Using Dynamic Modeling

“…Waste collection is an important part of solid waste management (SWM). Historically, waste collection was initiated to remove waste from urban areas in order to prevent adverse effects on public health, environmental quality, and the overall attractiveness of cities [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. Despite this obvious importance, the World Bank calculated that in 2018, 61% of populations living in low-income countries had no access to waste collection [8].…”

“…More recent studies have put new emphasis on the importance of waste management, as it has strong relations to global warming [10], the uncontrolled spread of hazardous substances [11], feeding waste plastics into the oceans [12,13], and many other problems [5,14,15].…”

Celebrating WM&R’s first 40 years – And lessons learned for the future

“…We also want to send a very special thanks to David Wilson and his contemporary witness report. His basic thesis is the need to understand the evolution of waste and resource management in the past in order to plan confidently for the future -we do not always have to reinvent the wheel (Wilson, 2023).…”