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.
Jakarta has responded to regular flooding by proposing gigantic infrastructure projects such as sea walls to keep the water at bay. But the main problem is that the city does not consider the land-water ecosystem as a whole, says Prathiwi W. Putri.
