The World Bank is warning of a “looming crisis” as city dwellers produce more and more waste. African cities are hard hit because the volume of waste is growing faster than the funds available for its collection.
Failure to collect garbage is making flood waters rise and there are fears it is even encouraging global warming. One of the co-authors of a new World Bank report “What a Waste: A Global Review of Solid Waste Management” is Dan Hoornweg. DW asked him what surprised him the most about its findings.
I guess the biggest find is just how fast the rate of solid waste in growing, today it is somewhere between 1.3, 1.4 billion tons a year that is produced and in just 10, 12 years, it will be somewhere around 2.2 billion tons. So it’s almost doubling every 10 years. An enormous rate of growth!
DW: And why do you think waste management has been ignored, especially in Africa?
Partly because it is the one service that pretty well only falls to local government, so this is the job that local governments do around the world. They tend to do it quietly. People only notice when it’s not working. I’m not so sure I would say it has been ignored. The point of the report is that things today with solid waste are very bad in terms of many cities in sub-Saharan Africa, they don’t even have 50 percent of the waste collected. And if things are this bad today, well, we are basically saying we need to start thinking very hard about what things are going to be like in about 10 to 15 years, when in some cities they will be looking at a four to five times budget increase, and two, three, four times the volume of waste. So it’s kind of early warning report if you will.
Source: DW.de