Global Waste Management

Models for Tackling the International Waste Crisis

Kamila Pope

• Editorial: Kogan Page
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781789660784
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Commerce
• Categoría: Développement durable en entreprise

WINNER: 2020 International Solid Waste Association Publication Award Among other factors, rapid global population growth, our development model and patterns of production and consumption have increased waste generation worldwide to unsustainable rates. This rise has led to crises in many countries where waste management practices are no longer sound. Global Waste Management outlines the emerging global waste crisis considering the perspectives of developed and developing countries around the world and the international relationships between them. This book provides an ecological viewpoint as well as studying these problems from a legal and justice standpoint. Global Waste Management contextualises the problems faced when dealing with waste including the causes and origins. Focus is given to cross border waste transfer, as an ongoing and controversial practice, making waste management a global matter. This book scrutinizes existing international, European and Brazilian regulation on waste to highlight the complexity of the subject and the weaknesses of the law. Using a critical and socio-ecological approach, the book proposes an original model of governance to support a new system of global waste management that takes into account ecological sustainability and social justice to overcome the waste crisis. To create these models, a theoretical framework on socio-ecological justice is developed and combined with different discourses and theories described throughout the book. This is the essential guide to understanding the global waste crisis and the future of waste management.

Part One

The socio-ecological problem of waste

01

The waste crisis

Origins and causes

If waste is the physical memory of the people, what people of sad memory we will be – vast and long memory, a heavy heritage of a lifestyle of use and abuse of Nature. If, as archaeologists say, waste is a sign of social content, what kind of society would this have been that, instead of producing waste to live, it seems to live to produce waste?

ALEXANDRA ARAGÃO

Introduction

At the end of 2012, the United Nations (UN) declared we are living through a genuine ‘global waste crisis’. Not long ago, however, waste was not a matter of concern. The international debate only began to highlight this crisis from the 1990s. Questions arise from this observation from the UN, such as ‘Why is humanity believed to be facing a waste crisis?’ as well as ‘What are the possible origins and causes of this crisis?’

The main objective of this chapter is to collect data, statistics and commentary on waste in recent decades. It is important to stress that the figures presented are only examples. An exhaustive survey of all the data of all types of waste is not the aim of this book, mainly due to time and spatial limitations. As will be seen from the data on waste generation, for example, the main focus will be on municipal solid waste figures, since they can be more easily accessed and verified. The numbers and information presented are nevertheless sufficient to demonstrate the waste crisis, even if they reveal only the tip of the iceberg.

Following the data collection, through the social metabolism approach, the biophysical reasons explaining the waste crisis will be explored. Finally, the dominant epistemological, geopolitical, economic and legal bases will be evaluated, which, at a deeper level, may have generated and deepened the overall ecological crisis, of which the waste crisis is a part.

Waste: a contemporary problem

Waste generation

From the outset of our existence, humans have generated and needed to dispose of waste. However, waste was not a significant source of damage or social and ecological conflicts and claims through much of our history as a species (Aragão, 2006). According to Aragão, in the Palaeolithic period, about 20,000 years ago, human populations lived exclusively from hunting, fishing and collecting plant foods. Known anthropologically as ‘hunter–gatherers’, the waste they generated was small in quantity and innocuous in quality, since the materials used by these people were essentially natural and rarely processed.

Hunter–gatherers were typically nomadic and used to move away from the waste they generated. This logic only changed about 10,000 years later, with the Neolithic Revolution. From this point, populations started to gradually settle in fixed places, mainly as a result of the development of agriculture and the domestication of animals. In addition to other important consequences, sedentism and a rapid increase in human populations occurred in the Neolithic period, giving rise to the need to create specific sites for waste disposal, away from human households (Aragão, 2006).

In the last phase of the Neolithic period, known as the Metal Age, approximately 6,000 years ago, the discovery of metal led to the development of new instruments. This caused not only the diversification of human activities but also the increase in waste generation and its durability. Fast forward 4,000 years or so and the conditions for the beginning of urbanization arose with the increase of agricultural productivity, the creation of surpluses and the resulting trade and professional specializations. The population density and type of consumption of the cities of the classical world, in the Greek and Roman Empires, around 2,800 years ago, finally turned waste into a subject of social concern (Aragão, 2006).

In the Middle Ages, the emergence of the artisanal economy, the development of trade, and the drastic increase in population made waste disposal a bigger issue. Coupled with the absence of any waste management system and the habit of throwing waste into the streets, it led, 650 years ago, to the spread of the Black Death in Western Europe and the death of approximately half the population within four years. With the Industrial Revolution and the phenomenon of rural exodus, there was an intensification of urbanization and the problems of space scarcity, conflicts, and damage caused by waste. Waste management had become increasingly challenging, and waste law emerged as urban law (Aragão, 2006).

Finally, about 60 years ago, from being an issue resolved by urban law, waste became a problem of environmental law. The different types of waste coming from different sources were now transferred and deposited together in places increasingly distant from their sources, and with no indication of their origins. Consequently, pollution and cumulative damage got worse, and those responsible for this damage and its victims could not be determined. The damage was now being mass produced and increasingly difficult to prove, no longer fitting into the civil legal schemes of establishing causation. Its current characteristics are typical of a new type of society: the Risk Society (Aragão, 2006).

On the Risk Society theory, see the works of Ulrich Beck.

From the second half of the 20th century, the global ecological crisis has been facing a new issue: the waste crisis. The constant and exponential increase of the world’s human population is a decisive factor for this problem. However, as will be seen in the course of this chapter, it is not the only one. Humanity is currently faced with its own inability to sustainably manage waste generated in ever-increasing quantities and of increasingly hazardous quality.

In 2012, the world generated more than 1.3 billion tonnes of municipal solid waste, and future forecasts are not encouraging. The World Bank argues that by 2025, more than 2.2 billion tonnes of waste will be generated per year (Hoornweg et al, 2012). On the other hand, statistical studies conducted by the European Union show the average amount of municipal solid waste generated per person in European countries in the last decade has been relatively stable: in 2007 this average was 523 kg per capita. By 2017, this number had dropped to 486 kg (Eurostat, 2019a).

All official numbers on waste generation and management in the EU are available on the Eurostat webpage: ec.europa.eu/eurostat

These figures indicate that the increase in waste generation predicted by the World Bank will occur more intensively in developing countries. By analysing the data for each European country separately, it remains clear the average waste generated by Western Europe is much higher (in many cases double) than in other European countries (Central and Eastern Europe), as well as most developing countries. For instance, while Denmark had a small decrease in waste generation from 790 kg per capita in 2007 to 781 kg in 2017, Poland, which generated 322 kg of waste per capita in 2007, reduced to 315 kg in 2017. Switzerland showed a fall in waste generation from 720 kg per capita in 2007 to 706 kg in 2017. These figures are halved in Latvia, which generated 391 kg per capita in 2007 and 438 kg in 2017 (Eurostat, 2019a).

In Brazil, surveys indicate in the year 2000, around 161,827 tonnes of municipal solid waste were generated each day, about 0.95 kg per capita per day, resulting in the disposition of just over 59 million tonnes of this type of waste in the year. These surveys report that Brazilian cities with up to 200,000 inhabitants collected between 450 and 700 gm of solid waste per capita per day, while in cities with more than 200,000 inhabitants this amount varied between 800 gm and 1.2 kg per capita (IBGE, 2001).

These numbers demonstrate that large urban areas generate a more significant amount of waste when compared to smaller cities or rural areas. Many variables can provide reasonable explanations for this, such as:

1. higher processing of products marketed in these large urban centres (mainly through overpackaging);
2. higher levels of consumption due to greater purchasing power, among others.

Research conducted by the IBGE and ABRELPE show that, in 2016, the amount of municipal solid waste generated in Brazil increased to more than 78 million tonnes, ie 214,405 tonnes per day; around 1.04 kg per capita per day (ABRELPE, 2017). The country’s municipal solid waste generation, therefore, had an increase of more than 19 million tonnes each year from 2000 to 2016. The annual generation per capita increased from 346.75 kg to 379.6 kg, ie each Brazilian generated about 33 kg of waste more than the previous average.

These numbers are a matter of concern and represent only part of the problem since they report only the municipal waste collected. From the extraction of natural resources, through to the production process, transportation, and other links in the chain, a vast amount of waste is generated across diverse sectors (industrial, real estate, transportation among others). Thus, the numbers highlighted can be considered quite literally the ‘tip of the iceberg’ in terms of waste generation.

In addition to the larger quantities of waste, humanity faces another new reality: the generation of increasingly hazardous waste. As mentioned, the waste generated by the risk society presents new elements that magnify the damage and risks to the environment. Currently, nuclear waste, electronic waste, hospital waste and other types of toxic and infectious waste are generated, such as those from pesticides.

Take electronic waste for example. It is estimated that around 44.7 million metric tonnes were generated worldwide in 2017, with projections for this number to grow to 120 million tonnes annually by 2050 in the worst-case scenario (PACE, 2019). Statistical data raised by the studies on the subject make clear the relationship between high generation of electronic waste and the increased gross domestic product (GDP) of the country. For instance, in 2014, while 1.9 million tonnes of electronic waste were generated across the African continent (1.7 kg per capita), Europe generated 11.6 million tonnes of waste (15.6 kg per capita) (Kumar et al, 2017).

The increasingly hazardous waste has been generated and disposed of at a growing rate. Together with other types of waste, it contains high levels of pollutants and toxins, causing soil, water and air contamination, among other types of damage to public health and the environment (Slade, 2006). These numbers are worrying and illustrate why waste is a contemporary problem and has been a recurring topic in international debates and agendas over the last few decades.

Waste transfers

Faced with these exponential rises, both quantitative (larger amounts of waste) and qualitative (greater variety of waste – hazardous and non-hazardous), waste has been transferred to final destinations increasingly distant from its origin, and cross-border waste transfer has become a reality. According to Kellenberg (2015), the global waste trading market has seen dramatic growth between 1992 and 2012, rising from 45.6 million tonnes in 1992 to over 222 million tonnes in 2011; an increase of over 500 per cent in two decades.

In that period, not only did the amount of waste transferred increase but also its destination underwent major changes. During the 1990s, up to 1997, when volumes of waste transferred internationally were still relatively low, much of the waste was destined for developed countries, with developing countries receiving only 18.7 per cent. Since 1998 however this trend has changed, and the amount of waste sent to developing countries has started to increase substantially, growing more than 40 per cent by 2009. Not only has there been an extraordinary increase in the amount of waste transferred to different countries in recent decades, but also a constant expansion of these transfers to developing countries, ie to Southern countries (Kellenberg, 2015).

Perhaps the (now) famous confidential memorandum sent in 1991 by Lawrence Summers (the chief economist of the World Bank at that time), defending cross-border waste transfer (especially to developing countries), may offer some explanation to this trend. He said:

Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [least developed countr...