This book ‘showcase[s] the good work that is being done on solid waste by cities around the world, large and small, rich and poor’. Taking 20 cities, mostly from developing countries but also including four from developed countries, the book describes the social, financial and institutional challenges they face, and how their waste management systems have evolved to meet these challenges. Following an introductory section explaining the factors underlying the importance of managing solid waste correctly, each city is set out as a two-page proforma describing in outline the drivers, systems for collection, disposal and resource management, and a snapshot of the overall effectiveness and reach of the civic authorities’ interventions. In essence the book comprises a cross-cutting analysis and assessment of the cities’ experiences with lessons learned, organised around three systems elements (collection, treatment and disposal, resource management) and three governance features (inclusivity, financial sustainability, sound institutions). The book is intended as a compendium of reference material for decision-makers grappling with solid waste issues in their cities, and, as such, presents an elegant make-over drawn from the many contributors to the writing of the city profiles, the key sheets and the analysis.
As Western cities have become more prosperous, they have gradually cut the connections linking sanitation, sewerage and solid waste with public health, along which disease and other vectors travel. Mechanisation of waste collection, disposal and resource management has also distanced communities from the waste generated, shielding them from the sights, smells and disabilities that can be inflicted through physical contact with waste.
Not so the inhabitants of many low- and middle-income cities, where solid waste management in any organised sense is often nonexistent, for a variety of reasons: cultural norms, inability of the city’s infrastructure to keep pace with explosive urbanisation and the rapid development of slum areas, financial constraints and occasionally municipal indifference to those of low socio-economic status. The challenges are huge, hence the temptation to import ready-made solutions from cities with established, more prosperous waste management regimes, in the mistaken belief that ‘tried and trusted’ remedies (generally complex technological solutions) that work in this environment cannot fail to kick-start a moribund system in the developing world.
The city profiles offer a salutary corrective to the hubris of advisers and funding agencies that ignore the particular social structures, physical and institutional limitations and financial constraints experienced by the host city. The watchword throughout the book is that the design of a waste management system should be bespoke, and work with the grain of the local mores and cultural values. Inevitably, moving from an ad hoc, unregulated activity to one that is managed and more environmentally secure requires injection of capital, and also imposes a higher recurrent cost on municipal budgets. Long-term sustainability in a technical sense, in turn, requires financial and institutional stability as a prerequisite. With many low-income cities barely able to maintain functioning utilities, utopian solutions are the enemy of the low-cost, pragmatic and the merely good. Bicycle-driven refuse carts may seem anomalous in a modern waste management system, but in a given situation they are affordable and more sustainable than motorised trucks, and just as effective.
A key feature highlighted in the city profiles is the contribution that the informal sector makes to resource recovery in developing low-income cities. Whereas developed cities often have to re-learn the virtues of materials recycling and recovery, this activity is woven into the very fabric of the livelihoods of low-income families living in many developing low-income cities. Embracing this sector within the overall design is critical both to the functioning of the system and to maintaining social cohesion.
A thought-provoking book could have been made even better by addressing a few relatively minor editorial glitches. Chapter 1, the executive summary, reads more like a foreword, and is located after a 10-page ‘Note to decision-makers’, the contents of which should more properly have been placed in Chapter 2, Introduction and key concepts. Readers are invited to skip the first part of Chapter 2 if they wished, but they have to read through this part before they reach the enjoiner. There is a fair amount of word-for-word repetition between the foreword and the first two chapters. The ‘Note to decision-makers’ introduces the three systems elements and three governance features of integrated solid waste management (see above) but Chapter 2 confusingly refers to ‘three important dimensions’ of Integrated Solid Waste Management ISWM – stakeholders, systems elements and aspects. Chapter 3, containing the city profiles, describes the ‘process flow approach’ and rightly emphasises the usefulness of the resulting process flow diagrams depicting material flows through the waste management system, three of which are given as examples. The profiles could have been improved immeasurably if the PDFs of all 20 cities had complemented the narrative in the proformas, containing as they do a wealth of useful information. Extravagant claims should have been edited out (is India really ‘a world leader in working on preventing, reducing and managing healthcare waste’?).
Chapter 5 asserts in a couple of places that waste management, specifically collection, is a public good. Notwithstanding the importance of waste management as an essential public service, in an economic sense it can be argued that it is not de facto a public good. White (1978) notes that municipal waste management services cannot be considered a public good since they neither exhibit ‘non-rivalness’ in consumption (in that pricing is necessary to define the level of each individual service) nor high exclusion costs.
If there is a single message that one takes away from this book, it is that waste management, often taken for granted in prosperous developed cities, is the lifeblood of many disadvantaged communities living in low-income cities. Explicitly recognising their contribution and worth by formally incorporating them into the waste management system is not only beneficial from an operational perspective, but is essential for social cohesiveness. Elevating waste management to the status of a profession means that those involved in its activities, be they in the formal or informal sector, then belong to a professional cadre, bringing dignity and opportunities for betterment to often forgotten communities.
