Sustainable building approaches are not only more environmentally friendly than conventional building methods – but they may also teach people how to avoid waste. Peter McIntosh, the founder of the Natural Building Collective, highlights the advantages through the example of Ulwazi Educare in Cape Town.
How can Vietnamese cities avoid the environmental pitfalls of rapid urbanisation? Adam Ward proposes solution-driven policies for key areas.
To achieve sustainable integrated waste management, municipalities need to move away from end-of-pipe approaches. What is rather needed are softer approaches that set incentives for sustainable waste management at an early stage of waste handling.
The large amount of electronic waste is a serious challenge in Lomé, Togo. At WoeLab, tech-savvy young people come up with solutions that clean the environment, ensure recycling of electronic waste, and educate residents on how to manage and valorise their electronic waste.
While Nigeria has made a leap in access to information communication technology (ICT) and the Internet in the past two decades, many of its residents still depend on imported used electrical and electronic equipment (UEEE). Since many of them turn out to be waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE), they worsen the challenge of electronic waste management. Prof. Oladele Osibanjo and Dr. Innocent Nnorom discuss this trade along with its environmental and human health implications.
In Bamenda, Cameroon, municipal waste management remains blind to how gender roles shape waste generation. Hedwig K. Ngwa Akum analyses how bridging the gender gap between waste generation and waste management would improve sanitation in the city.
In Brazil, Latin America’s largest country in terms of population, the City of Sao Paulo is committed to recycle organics. In 2015, the City embarked on a journey towards separate collection of organics, thus enabling the production of high-quality compost.
Plastic pollution is an enormous environmental problem around the globe. It is only through the creation of functioning local and global circular economies that the problem can be solved. Doug Woodring, founder of Plasticity Forum and Trish Hyde, founder of The Plastics Circle, suggest a 5-point-plan to optimise plastic's Second Life potential.
In order to save energy and resources, and to prevent waste from harming the environment, recycling is not enough. Cities should try to avoid waste production altogether, argue URBANET authors Carina Koop, Jennifer Schinkel, and Henning Wilts.
India has embarked on a Smart Cities Mission. But what do “smart” or “digital” cities actually have to deliver if they are to be a new model for sustainable urbanism? Urvashi Aneja analyses opportunities and risks of technological innovation and digital inclusion.
In precarious working environments, cooperatives hold an immense potential to increase social and economic inclusion of marginalized groups. Sonia Dias uses the examples of waste pickers cooperatives to illustrate how the concept of cooperatives helps implement the four pillars of the International Labor Organisation’s Decent Work Agenda—and calls on policy makers to create a favourable environment for this organisational form.
What are the linkages between solid waste management and urban health? And how can city governments improve waste management systems to reduce health risks? On the occasion of World Health Day, URBANET talked to Graham Alabaster, Chief of Sanitation and Waste Management at UN-Habitat.
Tangerang City in Indonesia has made a big leap from polluted to award winning green city. Watch the video and read the report by the Cities Development Initiative for Asia (CDIA) to find out how the city improved its solid waste management.
To what extent can cities be used as ‘anthropogenic material stocks’? How can international cooperation contribute? In the following interview, Professor Liselotte Schebek from Darmstadt’s Technical University and Uwe Becker, who manages a GIZ-run project in India, share their views on these issues.
In recent years there have been great advancements in solid waste management and people are becoming more and more aware of its importance. However especially in developing countries there is still a need for more sustainable solutions. We spoke to Jiao Tang and Luis Marinheiro about the current situation in waste management and what still needs to be done to make it more sustainable and innovative.
