5.3 Comparing cities‘ performance

Summary

This video explores the performance of municipal solid waste management systems, presented by Dr. Ljiljana Rodic, an expert in the field. The session highlights the importance of evaluating these systems using both quantitative and qualitative indicators, emphasizing the Wasteaware indicator set. This set covers physical components like waste collection and recycling, along with governance aspects like financial sustainability and stakeholder inclusivity. Real-world examples from cities worldwide illustrate the application of these indicators, aiming to improve waste management performance globally.

Takeaways

• 🌍 The module covers municipal solid waste management performance across cities worldwide.
• 👩‍🏫 Dr. Ljiljana Rodic, an expert in the field, presents insights from the Global Waste Management Outlook Report.
• 🗑️ Municipal solid waste management involves ensuring public health and environmental protection.
• 🔍 Monitoring and evaluating how waste management systems perform is crucial for continuous improvement.
• 📊 Waste management performance can be measured through both quantitative and qualitative indicators.
• 📈 The Wasteaware indicator set includes indicators for both physical components and governance aspects of waste management.
• 🏘️ Key quantitative indicators include waste collection coverage, waste captured by the system, and recycling rates.
• ♻️ Recycling rates vary widely and are not necessarily linked to a country’s income level.
• 📋 Qualitative indicators focus on aspects like waste collection points, quality of treatment, and occupational health and safety.
• 🌐 The Wasteaware indicator set has been applied in over 40 cities worldwide, and its findings can be used for performance comparison and improvement.

Q & A

Who is presenting the module on municipal solid waste management in this script?

Dr. Ljiljana Rodic is presenting the module on comparing cities' performance in municipal solid waste management.

What is the purpose of comparing municipal solid waste management systems between cities?

Comparing municipal solid waste management systems helps evaluate their effectiveness in achieving public health and environmental protection goals, and allows for identifying strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement.

What are the two groups of indicators in the Wasteaware indicator set?

The Wasteaware indicator set is divided into two groups: physical components of the waste management system and governance aspects.

What are examples of quantitative indicators in the Wasteaware set?

Quantitative indicators include waste collection coverage, waste captured by the system, percentage of waste taken to controlled treatment or disposal facilities, and recycling rates.

How do recycling rates differ across countries with varying income levels?

Recycling rates do not directly correlate with income levels. Some high-income countries have low recycling rates, while some middle- and low-income countries can recycle up to 50% and 30% of their waste, respectively.

Why are qualitative indicators important in evaluating solid waste management systems?

Qualitative indicators assess aspects that cannot be quantified but are crucial for a well-functioning system, such as the appearance of waste collection points, environmental controls, and occupational safety for workers.

What does the 'collection coverage' indicator measure in municipal solid waste management?

The collection coverage indicator measures the percentage of households that receive waste collection services in a given city or region.

What are some governance aspects measured by the Wasteaware indicator set?

Governance aspects measured include inclusivity of stakeholders, financial sustainability, and the existence of national and local institutions and policies to support waste management.

Can you give an example of a qualitative indicator related to waste treatment and disposal?

An example of a qualitative indicator for waste treatment and disposal is the criterion related to monitoring and verification of environmental controls, which assesses the quality of waste treatment facilities.

How many cities have applied the Wasteaware indicators, and what is the significance of this widespread application?

The Wasteaware indicators have been applied in around 40 cities across six continents, showcasing their global relevance and helping cities worldwide evaluate and improve their waste management systems.

Outlines

00:00

👋 Introduction to Municipal Solid Waste Management Performance

The introduction welcomes the audience to a new module on comparing city performances in municipal solid waste management. Dr. Ljiljana Rodic, an expert in the field, is introduced as the speaker. She has contributed to the Global Waste Management Outlook Report for UNEP. The presenter then emphasizes the need to evaluate the effectiveness of waste management systems to ensure public health, environmental protection, and city residents' needs are met. Dr. Rodic outlines the importance of understanding how decisions are made and monitored in waste management practices.

05:00

📊 Importance of Measuring Solid Waste Management Performance

Dr. Rodic explains how assessing the performance of solid waste management systems is critical for identifying strengths and areas for improvement. Traditionally, performance is measured using quantitative indicators like waste collection coverage and recycling rates. However, not everything that matters can be quantified. This introduces the Wasteaware indicator set, a comprehensive tool that includes both quantitative and qualitative metrics for evaluating waste management systems. Physical components, such as waste collection and recycling, and governance aspects, like financial sustainability and stakeholder inclusivity, are both assessed using this indicator set.

10:04

♻️ Physical Indicators of Waste Management Performance

The paragraph focuses on the four quantitative indicators used to assess the physical aspects of waste management systems: waste collection coverage, waste captured by the system, controlled treatment and disposal, and recycling rates. Examples from different income-level countries illustrate these indicators. High-income countries generally have high waste collection and disposal rates, while middle- and low-income countries show wide variations. Recycling rates, unlike other indicators, do not directly correlate with a country's income level. For example, high-income countries can have lower recycling rates compared to middle- or low-income countries.

📉 Qualitative Indicators and Global Case Studies

This paragraph delves into the qualitative indicators in the Wasteaware set. These indicators cover aspects such as waste collection points' appearance, the quality of treatment and disposal facilities, and occupational health and safety in recycling. Examples from Bolivia, the Balkans, and Asia illustrate the differences in these indicators between various countries. Governance indicators focus on the inclusivity of stakeholders, financial sustainability, and the capacity of local institutions. Cities worldwide, including those in India and Costa Rica, provide real-world examples of how the Wasteaware indicators have been applied.

🌍 Governance and City Examples of Waste Management Indicators

The focus shifts to the governance aspects of the Wasteaware indicators, which include five qualitative indicators on stakeholder inclusivity, financial sustainability, and national and local institutional frameworks. The section provides examples of public awareness campaigns, such as a waste segregation poster from Bangalore, and documents that support policy implementation, like those from Costa Rica. A key point is the importance of local institutional capacity, which is often a bottleneck in waste management. The Wasteaware indicators have been applied in 40 cities across six continents, offering insight into global waste management practices.

🏁 Conclusion and Call to Action

The final paragraph concludes the presentation by summarizing the benefits of knowing the performance of solid waste management systems. The distinctions between quantitative and qualitative indicators are reiterated, with emphasis on how the Wasteaware indicators effectively cover both aspects. With experience from 40 cities globally, the audience is encouraged to apply these indicators in their own cities. Dr. Rodic invites further engagement by providing her email for questions or comments.

Keywords

💡Municipal Solid Waste Management

Municipal solid waste management refers to the system of collecting, treating, and disposing of waste materials produced by urban areas. This concept is central to the video, as the speaker discusses how cities perform in managing waste, ensuring public health, and protecting the environment. It includes activities like waste segregation, collection, recycling, and disposal, as illustrated by examples of waste collection coverage in various countries.

💡Wasteaware Indicator Set

The Wasteaware indicator set is a comprehensive tool for measuring the performance of solid waste management systems. It includes both quantitative and qualitative indicators to assess different aspects of waste management, such as physical processes (e.g., waste collection, recycling) and governance aspects (e.g., inclusivity of stakeholders, financial sustainability). The video highlights how this set enables cities to compare their waste management systems and identify areas for improvement.

💡Quantitative Indicators

Quantitative indicators are numerical measurements used to assess specific aspects of waste management, such as the percentage of households receiving waste collection services or the recycling rate. In the video, examples of quantitative indicators include waste collection coverage and the percentage of waste sent to controlled facilities. These indicators help provide concrete data for evaluating the effectiveness of solid waste management systems.

💡Qualitative Indicators

Qualitative indicators are non-numerical measures that describe the quality or characteristics of waste management processes. In the video, the Wasteaware set includes qualitative indicators to assess aspects like the quality of waste collection points and the effectiveness of environmental controls at disposal sites. These indicators offer insights into areas that cannot be easily quantified but are crucial for system performance.

💡Public Health

Public health refers to the well-being of a city's population in relation to sanitation and environmental conditions. The video emphasizes the importance of solid waste management in protecting public health, for example, by ensuring that 100% of households receive waste collection services. Proper waste management is essential to preventing diseases and ensuring a clean urban environment.

💡Environmental Protection

Environmental protection involves safeguarding natural resources and reducing pollution. In the context of waste management, this means ensuring that waste is properly treated and disposed of in controlled facilities. The video illustrates how waste management systems can contribute to environmental protection, with examples of controlled landfills in high-income countries and open dumps in low-income areas.

💡Recycling Rate

The recycling rate is the percentage of total waste that is recycled rather than sent to landfills or incinerators. In the video, the recycling rate is presented as an important quantitative indicator, with examples of cities like Adelaide achieving a 55% rate, while other countries vary widely. The recycling rate helps assess the efficiency of a city’s waste management in recovering valuable resources from waste.

💡Governance Indicators

Governance indicators assess how well the management and organizational structures of a waste management system function. These indicators include the inclusivity of stakeholders, financial sustainability, and the existence of solid waste management policies at both national and local levels. The video highlights how governance indicators are essential for understanding how decisions are made and ensuring that waste management systems operate effectively.

💡Inclusivity of Stakeholders

Inclusivity of stakeholders refers to the involvement of all relevant groups, such as residents and service providers, in the waste management process. The video emphasizes that this inclusivity is key to effective governance and ensures that the needs of the population are met. For example, public awareness and education campaigns about waste segregation in cities like Bangalore are part of stakeholder inclusivity efforts.

💡Controlled Waste Facilities

Controlled waste facilities are locations where waste is treated or disposed of in a manner that meets environmental safety standards. These facilities play a critical role in ensuring environmental protection by controlling emissions and managing pollutants. The video compares high-income countries with controlled facilities to low-income countries where waste is often dumped in open, uncontrolled areas, showing the disparities in waste management infrastructure.

Highlights

Dr. Ljiljana Rodic presents insights on municipal solid waste management, with a focus on performance measurement and comparison.

Global Waste Management Outlook Report is cited as a key resource for the course content.

Rodic emphasizes the importance of measuring solid waste management effectiveness for public health and environmental protection.

Municipal waste management decisions can be made through strategic planning or day-to-day operations, followed by monitoring and adaptation.

Performance measurement helps to check gut feelings against facts and identify strengths and areas for improvement.

The Wasteaware indicator set is introduced, combining quantitative and qualitative measures for solid waste management performance.

Physical components of waste management, such as collection, transport, recycling, and disposal, are measured with four quantitative indicators.

Governance aspects of solid waste management are addressed through five qualitative indicators related to institutions, finances, and inclusivity.

Waste collection coverage is essential for public health, with high-income countries typically achieving 100% coverage.

Control of treatment and disposal facilities is critical for environmental protection, with varying levels of success across income levels.

Recycling rates do not always correlate with income level, with both high- and low-income countries showing diverse results.

Examples of qualitative indicators include the appearance of waste collection points and the quality of environmental controls at disposal sites.

Occupational health and safety in recycling activities are considered in qualitative performance measures, particularly for informal sector workers.

Governance indicators include criteria such as public awareness, capacity of local institutions, and the existence of implementation documents.

The Wasteaware indicators have been applied in 40 cities worldwide, offering a tested method for evaluating waste management performance.

Transcripts

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.