748535
editorial2017
WMR0010.1177/0734242X17748535Waste Management & ResearchEditorial
Editorial
Building capacity for community waste
management in low- and middle-income
countries
The global waste crisis
The inaugural Global Waste Management Outlook (GWMO)
tells the story of two worlds (UNEP and ISWA, 2015; Wilson and
Velis, 2015). In the Global North, we take for granted a reliable
and high quality solid waste management (SWM) service. To
such an extent that it is seldom recognised for what it is, as one of
the essential utility services underpinning modern society; and
sitting alongside water supply and sewerage, electricity and gas,
telephone and broadband Internet, and transport. In the Global
South, more than 3 billion people lack this basic utility service –
more than 2 billion have no waste collection service (either for-
mal or informal), and even wastes that are collected are simply
dumped or burned. Without action, this global waste crisis or
emergency will grow – many African cities will double both their
population and their waste generation over the next 15–20 years.
The local impacts are devastating: on child health and develop-
ment, on flooding and infectious diseases caused by wastes
blocking drains, and on both air pollution from open burning and
water pollution from leachate. But mismanaged solid wastes in
developing countries has global consequences as well, being the
major source of plastics entering the oceans (Velis et al., 2017)
and contributing significantly to climate change.
The international community must respond to this crisis; the
GWMO calls for an increase in international development finance
directed at SWM, from the current 0.3% (Lerpiniere et al., 2014)
to 3% throughout the period up to 2030, in order to extend waste
collection to all and eliminate open dumping and burning of
waste. Owing to the cross-cutting nature of waste management,
providing basic waste services to all will contribute to no fewer
than 12 out of the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs)
agreed by world leaders to achieve a sustainable future for our
planet (Lenkiewicz and Webster, 2017; Rodic and Wilson, 2017).
To this end, the International Solid Waste Association (ISWA) is
leading a campaign for the short-term closure of the world’s 50
largest dumpsites (International Solid Waste Association, 2016).
Community waste management
However, it is not enough simply to wait for the international
community to work with national and local governments to solve
the problem from the ‘top down’. There is a parallel approach:
Community waste management. We define this as: ‘waste man-
agement and recycling practised by community based organisa-
tions, which could be in provincial towns, villages, remote rural
areas, small island communities or parts of cities in low
Waste Management & Research
2018, Vol. 36(1) 1­–2
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and middle income countries where there is no, or inadequate,
municipal waste management service’ (Lenkiewicz and Webster,
2017). Put simply, the idea is to help communities in the poorest
countries, where the local authority often has no funds to provide
a service, to tackle the problem themselves through the resource
value in the wastes. If, for example, food wastes or plastics are
kept separate, they can be turned into new, useful products. With
simple tools and the right knowledge, people can become self-
employed recycling entrepreneurs, providing a very valuable ser-
vice for the health and wellbeing of their community, and the
whole planet – as well as reducing poverty and creating sustain-
able livelihoods. The GWMO (UNEP and ISWA, 2015) show-
cased early examples of this approach, including work in
Cameroon, Nigeria and Uganda (GWMO, Box 4.27) facilitated
by the UK livelihoods non-government organisation, Living
Earth Foundation (2015); and Women Initiative The Gambia
(GWMO, Case Study 15), whose work has since been facilitated
by the new waste industry charity WasteAid UK.
Practical guidance – How to do it
One of the gaps identified by the GWMO was for practical guid-
ance on such low-cost ‘waste to wealth’ technologies that involve
minimal capital investment and make products to sell in a local
market. So, when one of us (the GWMO’s editor-in-chief David
Wilson) was elected as the incoming President of CIWM (the UK
national member of ISWA), and had the opportunity to select his
Presidential project, he commissioned WasteAid UK to prepare
such guidance, which was launched at his inauguration in October
2017 under the title Making Waste Work: A Toolkit (Lenkiewicz
and Webster, 2017). This is in three parts.
•• Be informed: Community waste management essentials.
•• Be prepared: How do I make a waste project happen?
•• Be inspired: Step-by-step ‘How-to’ guides.
The How-to guides cover waste audits, collection and disposal,
and nine low-cost recycling/recovery processes employing appro-
priate technologies for organic wastes and low-grade plastics. The
deliberate focus on organics and plastics is owing to the preva-
lence of these, both in the waste as generated and in the residual
waste stream. They tend to be the lowest value materials and are
therefore rarely collected for recycling. As a result, it is such
materials that often cause problems where waste remains uncol-
lected. Organic wastes and plastic film are often mixed together:
gathering rainwater for mosquitoes and bacteria to breed in;
2 Waste Management & Research 36(1)
Figure 1.  An example illustration from the Toolkit, taken
from How to Guide No. 8 on transforming plastic waste into
paving tiles.
Artwork: Susan Hatfield. © WasteAid UK.
blocking drains and aggravating flooding; releasing methane
emissions; harming the health of wildlife, livestock and humans;
and entering the oceans. Making Waste Work provides simple,
attractively illustrated, step-by-step instructions for turning these
waste streams, and others, into useful products that can be used in
the home or sold in local markets. Typical products include com-
post, low-smoke charcoal briquettes, and construction materials
(Figure 1).
Further research needs
This new toolkit fulfils one need, for practical guidance for use
by community-based organisations and would-be waste entrepre-
neurs, on the ground. During its preparation we identified a paral-
lel requirement, for the scientific underpinning of some of the
technologies. Some of the How-to guides are taken from existing
sources (e.g. organic waste into biogas, waste collection, waste
disposal in a controlled site), while others are adapted from pre-
vious experience (e.g. carrying out a waste composition analysis,
organic waste to compost, composting using worms), which all
sit on a reasonable evidence base.
Other technologies have perhaps been around for some time,
but have been documented here in greater detail, and also in the
David C Wilson
Department of Civil and
Environmental Engineering,
Imperial College London, UK
Email: waste@davidcwilson.com
context of a ‘waste first’ rather than a ‘livelihoods first’ approach;
that is, the focus is on ‘low-tech’ approaches to proactively man-
age ‘difficult’ waste streams, where recycling options are not
readily available. It is these technologies that would benefit most
from systematic scientific research. A case in point is paving tiles
made from unrecyclable plastics, such as the water sachets ubiq-
uitous in West Africa. In parallel to work on the toolkit, Chris
Cheeseman’s team at Imperial College London undertook two
laboratory-based projects to optimise the process and to charac-
terise the products. Other technologies that could benefit from
further research include woody waste into fuel briquettes, fish
waste into animal feed, simple approaches to identifying com-
mon types of plastic, plastic waste and bottles into ecobricks, and
crocheting film plastic into bags and mats. WM&R has estab-
lished its reputation for publishing the results of such research on
novel technologies, and the editors look forward to receiving
your good manuscripts on these topics for peer review.
References
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Mike Webster
CEO, WasteAid UK