Urban Solid Waste Management Services

Conference Moderator: Reid Lifset
Assistant Moderator: Lisa Fernandez

Introduction

The Internet discussion on solid waste management (SWM) in developing country cities brought together planners, organizers, consultants and academics from government, development agencies, private companies, NGOs and universities in thirty countries.

Five topics, distilled from a priority list of issues contributed by each discussant, became the focus of the exchange of thoughts and experience over the 12-week period:

1. Financing: How is the increasing private involvement in urban waste management services being financed?
2. Governance and Regulation: How are governments and users regulating the provision of SWM services?
3. Capacity Building: How can the capacity for public-private partnerships be developed so that the public and private sectors can work together?
4. Community Participation: How can private involvement best meet the needs of users and citizens, particularly the poor?
5. Technology: How are technologies best used to promote innovation and transfer within the context of public-private partnerships?

Each topic was discussed in turn, for a period of ten days to three weeks. The debate under each topic elicited many case examples of best practices (and occasionally, worst practices) where the public and the private sector collaborate in some way in the delivery of SWM services. Some participants contributed their thoughts on useful resources. Highlights of each topic discussed are excerpted below.

I. Financing Arrangements

The traditional source of support for SWM is still municipal government. Collection, processing and disposal are still municipal government and often some sort of external aid. However, this generalisation hides telling details about the differences in financing arrangements for primary collection, versus transfer and disposal. Overall, communities themselves, either households or neighborhood associations, very often pay for waste collection services directly. Municipal government then pays for transfer and disposal.

Collection is the locus of private entrepreneurship in SWM. Often, these private approaches are called "informal" because they operate at the margins of a municipality's regulatory authority. Many examples were provided of the integration of "informal" collection enterprises into municipal SWM systems. In many cases, the private informal sector was better at keeping pace with rapid urban growth because of its ability to respond with flexibility given varying neighborhood needs and because of its small scale of operation.

To varying degrees, low-income communities will pay for collection. This is particularly true if the means used are flexible and inexpensive (e.g., rickshaws, donkey carts, manual labor). However, in very low-income situations, often in squatter settlements at the expanding urban fringe, people are too poor to pay anything and burning of waste or dumping into waterways is common. Even in neighborhoods where waste is collected by private micro-enterprises, coverage may be quite inefficient, leaving uncollected a high portion of wastes generated. Whether government oversight of these widespread "informal" efforts would improve efficiency was not determined. In the one instance discussed of external aid provision to local SWM micro-enterprises, real costs were not recovered.

Whether formal or informal, recycling of wastes collected often helps finance other parts of the SWM operation. Again to varying degrees, the scavenging community has been the foundation of this reuse/recycling effort and has been incorporated into regulated municipal approaches.

Community financing is not universal. It is generally limited to collection and even then the willingness to pay varies greatly. Linking SWM with other concerns such as job creation helps improve the odds that a waste management system can take hold for the long term and find financial and political support. Ultimately, fuller integration of the labor-intensive private informal micro-enterprise sector will need to occur. Ironically perhaps, further institutional development and more effective regulatory frameworks may facilitate this and the greater involvement of private capital overall.

II. Governance and Regulation

The discussion of governance by the waste group explored "best practices" for institutional arrangements at the national, regional and local levels conducive to formation and operation of SWM with the private sector involved in some way. Much of the discussion focused on the kind of guidance national governments could provide to enable best practices for local SWM with privatisation to evolve most efficiently.

National legislation and local implementation

Privatisation should proceed slowly. Moving from one extreme (complete reliance on public sector delivery of urban services like waste management) to the opposite extreme (indiscriminate privatisation) is unlikely to produce desirable results. Privatisation of SWM in developing country cities should proceed with caution: mechanisms for good governance need to be in place for privatisation to benefit the population in need of such services.

Local constraints should be reflected in enabling policies. Although MSWM is, most of the time, a matter for implementation at the municipal level, enabling policy, regulatory and legislative frameworks are critical at state/provincial and national levels. Practical constraints on applying enabling policies at the local level must be taken into account, preferably before the policies are enacted.

Capacity paradox. Privatisation works best when the municipal government involved has the capabilities to effectively engage and oversee the private party involved. But this presents a paradox: such capable governments are least in need of the efficiencies and technical skills the private sector can contribute. PPP requires financial, administrative and managerial capacity to succeed and it is the very lack of that capacity that, in part, drives the desire to establish PPPs.

Priority SWM issues for national legislatures to address

National governments can provide top-down guidance for best SWM practices and have a role in catalysing state and local action. In terms of the issues to which legislators should first turn, there are several points.

In developing countries, waste reduction is a minor issue. Extensive informal recycling often occurs and because waste generation rates are still low in comparison to industrialised countries, although a modified version of the hierarchy would be useful for newly industrialising economies where generation rates are growing rapidly. In the poorest countries, extending service coverage for collection and disposal is a top priority. Overall, given the importance of informal refuse collection and recycling activities in developing countries, national governments could provide guidance as to how best to incorporate them into formal SWM systems.

Price regulation

Full-cost accounting. Determining the real costs of SWM can help municipal governments and the communities served identify the best SWM practices. The latest method of determining costs is called "full cost accounting" (FCA). FCA methods can help fairly determine the value of services or resources provided privately or informally. The FCA method is most useful for fairly advanced situations where adequate legal frameworks are already in place and where service coverage is fairly complete. Accurately costing MSW programs ensures fiscal accountability and helps communities make fair choices about MSW options, including partnerships.

III. Capacity Building

Target individuals, groups and organisations. In developing countries, many people working in the area lack the most basic technical and financial knowledge about solid waste management. All solid waste management (SWM) projects in developing countries ideally should include training for staff at the outset as well as on an ongoing basis for continuing to build human resources capacity at local, regional and national levels. At the institutional level, the capacity building process includes, at a minimum, training in planning, accounting, and budgeting. All organisations, including private companies, NGOs, political bodies as well as governmental entities should be targeted for capacity building.

One approach that has been effectively implemented by the International Solid Waste Association (ISWA) in Argentina, India and Croatia is to support the establishment of national professional solid waste management associations. This is helpful in facilitating the exchange of information among professionals in the field and lends credibility and a positive image to the profession. Such associations also help support motivated individuals, who are critical to the process of building capacity more broadly.

Motivated individuals are key. Individual champions are needed to build the capacity to organize in the informal sector. One caveat on individual champions: their performance depends on the right conditions being in place. This means appropriate legal frameworks, politically sensitive (and supportive) superiors, etc. These conditions will help allow motivated individuals to shine.

Peers training peers. Beyond training of both individuals and institutions, capacity building can be seen as a means to three ends relevant to public-private partnerships for SWM. These are to: (1) enhance effective participation of all stakeholders; (2) improve the technical expertise to manage wastes from generation to disposal; and (3) build management capacity to design and oversee effective logistics for municipal SWM. One way of putting these three elements together is "action research," in which all participants in the system (users, collectors, managers, regulators) contribute to findings. "Peer to peer training" by scavengers or other types of field operators is a key to such participatory research. It enables training to build on itself and create its own multiplier effect. This goes back to the point about the importance of building up networks or associations of people working in SWM.

The "peer to peer" approach can be taken one step further, as local governments have a great deal to learn from each other so that when privatisation is first contemplated, an ad hoc approach can be avoided. Government officials at all levels can learn from experience in other jurisdictions. Building capacity is best accomplished via the "see - learn - do" method. When Surat and Calcutta city managers found innovative ways to clean up, other city managers came at their own expense to learn about the approaches and then adapted them in their own cities. Success works well as a training tool.

IV. Community Participation

Users as partners. Can best be involved in designing private sector involvement if they are involved, not just as users, but as equal partners in planning, design, monitoring and project evaluation. Participation is not an end in itself, a chance for politicians and funders to showcase "success." It is a means of ensuring the best outcome for users.

Incentives. It is important to determine the right incentives to get people involved and also to stay involved. Some combination of inducements appears to be critical in promoting community participation. In Senegal, for example, children receive movie tickets for turning in recyclables, and in Curitiba, Brazil, people receive bus tickets and vegetables. These types of simple payment programs seem to be effective in achieving high rates of participation in recycling. Attracting and maintaining community participation at a broader political level in the design of public-private partnerships may be more nuanced and bears further discussion.

Participation. Time consuming but critical. One common problem is that external funders and agencies by-pass existing entities that might enable broad participation in projects because such bodies are considered corrupt and/or inefficient. While there is a great deal of research about transforming these participatory institutions so they could work effectively, more is needed on why existing means of participation are ineffective. Part of the problem may be that external funders give priority to efficient achievement of project goals and community participation, while ultimately guaranteeing more sustainable outcomes, requires more time.

V. Technology

Technology is needed to deal with changing waste composition and quantities. Many aspects of SWM technology are potentially relevant to improving solid waste services in urban settings in developing countries. The changing and growing waste stream in emerging economies may affect technology choices. The urban population in most developing countries is expected to grow by more than 50 percent by 2020 -- in and of itself this population increase implies tremendous needs in the area of urban waste management. But this is not the only factor. The proportion of plastics, hazardous materials and paper used in developing country cities is growing, altering the composition of materials in the waste stream.

The implications of these factors for formal and informal urban SWM systems are huge. As SWM systems expand to meet the needs of a growing population, the economies of scale achievable with large, capital-intensive approaches like waste-to-energy incineration or sanitary landfilling may become attractive economically. Because such approaches often rely on proprietary technology, they are commonly provided by the private sector. The risks and expense of relying on large-scale technologies may not be desirable or appropriate, depending on the context.

Build on the basics. Policies that enhance and expand existing basic approaches may be an alternative or even complementary course. There are many successful examples of integrating informal SWM approaches, particularly in the areas of collection, recycling and composting, with government-backed transfer and disposal (these have been discussed earlier in this forum). Building upon the myriad of innovations that have been implemented on a small scale in many different settings can have positive economic, public health and environmental impacts. Low-tech recycling and composting confer important environmental benefits, particularly in reducing methane emissions from landfills, reducing demands for nitrogen-based fertilizers, and increasing carbon sequestration in forests. Such approaches, basic but proven, capital extensive instead of capital intensive, may be critical to global climate change mitigation strategies as well as to local waste management in developing country cities.

It should be kept in mind, however, that low-tech approaches cannot divert the bulk of the waste stream, particularly as the waste becomes composed of more plastics and hazardous materials. Therefore, environmentally acceptable transfer and disposal of the remainder after informal and market-based systems have reused, recycled and composted, remains critical. Whatever the waste management systems eventually identified and chosen, training and technical support for the technology transfer must be included for the initial implementation and for the long term.

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