Hi and welcome to this new module on comparing cities performance in municipal solid waste management. This topic will be presented by Dr. Ljiljana Rodic, who is an expert in this field. Her most recent work includes the Global Waste Management Outlook Report, that she prepared with colleagues for UNEP. In this course we have taken various insights from this report. Welcome Ljiljana, the floor is yours! Thank you very much Imanol. It is a pleasure to be here and share my experiences with you. If we look at the cities around the world, most have some form of solid waste management services. In fact, some perform very well, while others still face numerous challenges as we have seen throughout this course. But how do you know, whether it all works, whether it achieves its objectives on public health and environmental protection, whether it meets the needs of the city's residence. For example, is this good or bad? How do we know? And why do we care to know? So, in municipal solid waste management practice, we make decisions how things will be done either deliberately and putting them down in strategic planning documents or we make them as we go along, as day-to-day operations require, and then react upon these decisions. But then it is wise to take some time to observe or monitor how the system is actually functioning, whether the plan works in practice. And then we reflect on these observations to see whether some changes would be appropriate. If we identify some shortcomings and possibilities for improvements we adapt our plans or make new ones and another cycle begins. Well, measuring the performance of our solid waste management system and even comparing it with that of our peers can be very beneficial. Some of the major benefits are listed here. It is very important to check our gut feeling against the facts. It is also very beneficial to identify the existing strengths, which are often overlooked. And such a measurement is very beneficial for the learning cycle that we have seen in the previous slide. Traditionally, performance of urban waste management systems is measured by means of numerical quantitative indicators, such as percentage of households that receive waste collection services or percentage of waste that is taken to recycling facilities. However, it has been said that "Not everything that counts, can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts". Accordingly, there are aspects of waste management that do not lend themselves to quantification, they simply cannot be expressed by numbers, but they are very important for a well-functioning system. Among various sets of indicators that have been proposed, one is particularly comprehensive in this sense, as it includes both, quantitative and qualitative indicators to measure, describe and enable comparison of performance of solid waste management systems. It is the Wasteaware indicator set. It consists of two groups of indicators related to physical components and governance aspects of a solid waste management system. As you know, physical components of the system describe what happens with waste, starting from waste generation, segregation at source, collection and transfer, sorting, transport, recycling, energy recovery and disposal. Governance indicators address how things are done, considering three essential aspects: institutions, finances and inclusivity of important stakeholders. Physical components are measured by four quantitative indicators and three qualitative indicators, whereas governance aspects are measured by five qualitative indicators. The Wasteaware indicator set includes four quantitative indicators for physical components of the system. Two of them pertain to waste collection: One is waste collection coverage, which is percentage of households that receive services and waste captured by the system, which is percentage of the waste generated. The third quantitative indicator pertains to control treatment and disposal, which is percentage of waste destined for treatment or disposal that goes to controlled facilities. And finally, we have a recycling rate and that is percentage of waste generated. That is included in recycling and valorization of organic waste. Now, I will give you examples of three of those indicators. For protection of public health it is essential, that collection coverage is complete. In other words, that hundred percent of people receive waste collection services. This is indeed the case in high-income countries, as well as in many east block countries and in many cities in People's Republic of China. Waste collection coverage varies between 60% and 100% in the middle income countries, as we can see here on the examples of Buenos Aires and Delhi. And it varies between 35 and 85% in low-income countries. For environmental protection, it is essential that waste that is collected gets to the facilities that are controlled. Here we see very high percentages in high-income countries and the full range of variation from O to 100% in middle-income countries. In low-income countries this range is also very broad, from 0 to 85%. As you have seen in previous modules, resource value is recovered from waste. Interestingly unlike the previous two indicators recycling rates are not really related to the income level. Some high-income countries score rather low in this indicator, while lower-income countries score high. We do have Adelaide here with 55%, but some other cities in Europe, for example, score 20 to 25%. Middle-income countries recycle in some cases up to 50% of their waste and low-income countries up to 30%. In addition to such quantitative indicators, Wasteaware set includes three qualitative indicators for performance of physical components. Each of these indicators consists of five or six criteria. In here, I just give a few examples of these criteria. For example, criterion 1C.1 pertaining to collection, describes appearance of waste collection points. And you can clearly see the difference between two collection points, both in Bolivia. Or for example criterion 2E.3 that describes the quality of treatment and disposal. It is the criterion monitoring and verification of environmental controls. On the left, you see an open dump with open fires and all kinds of emissions and no controls in this case in one of the Balkan countries in Europe. And on the right, you can see an engineered landfill with all the measures of environmental controls for leachate and landfill gas in People's Republic of China. As an example of a criterion under the recycling qualitative indicator, you can see here occupational health and safety of the workers who are involved in sorting and recycling activities. In both pictures we can see the informal sector, on the left is a transfer station in Nepal, and on the right it is plastic recycling in India. For governance aspects, Wasteaware set includes five qualitative indicators. They're listed here. They pertain to inclusivity of stakeholders. In this case, service users and service providers, Then, there is one indicator on financial sustainability and two indicators on institutions and policies: one at national level on solid waste management framework and one at local level, which deals with local institutions. Here are also some examples of the criteria that comprise the main indicator. One of the criteria under the indicator user inclusivity. We have this criterion which pertains to public awareness and education. And here you can see a poster for waste segregation at source in Bangalore India. Under the indicator national policy framework, we have a criterion that pertains to existence of appropriate implementation documents. So, once you have strategies and legislation also documents are needed to help practitioners to implement indeed such documents in practice. In here, we have an example of such a document from Costa Rica. Under the indicator on local institutions, there is a criterion, a very important one, on capacity of local institutions which as we know from practice is often a bottleneck in many countries. And now, we will see some examples of cities where Wasteaware indicators have been applied. These cities are spread across different levels of income and you can look at the numbers later. On here you will also find references to some relevant literature. Until now Wasteaware indicators have been applied in around 40 cities on six continents. So, here we are at the end of this presentation. First we saw the benefits of knowing about the performance of solid waste management systems. We distinguished between quantitative and qualitative indicators and we saw in what way Wasteaware indicators address both of this. The experience is in 40 cities around the world. Why not try it in your own city? Should you have any questions or comments, do not hesitate to contact me at the email address given here.
