the way I sometimes think about it, Jeff is to think of somebody sitting under a waterfall of waste just drenching them in waste. And that's the situation for many poorer countries, Municipal solid waste, the trash that cities and towns produced or what most of us call garbage is projected by 2050 to triple in volume and low-income countries and nearly double in middle-income countries. So why does this matter? You ask?
Well, heaps of trash silently mount and flow into our oceans becoming a growing threat to people on the planet. Right now, most of the waste is managed improperly untreated and disposed of in open dumps left unmanaged the growing volume and changing composition of waste, including non biodegradable and plastic waste will contribute to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions and land and water pollution, which disproportionately affect the health and welfare of impoverished people.
Welcome to what have we learned? The evaluation podcast. I'm Jeff Tell Ski, manager of the Economic Management and Country Programs unit at the World Bank Groups Independent Evaluation group. In this episode, we're going to talk about municipal solid waste with this issue of considerable importance to developing countries. It's not surprising that the World Bank group is by far the leading source of multilateral lending and knowledge generation on solid waste management.
Having provided about three billion from municipal solid waste management between 2010 and 2020 now, the Independent evaluation group recently published transitioning to a circular economy an evaluation of the World Bank Group, Support from municipal solid waste management. The report notes that the international community, including the World Bank Group, has been slow in implementing a comprehensive approach to this challenge.
While the bank group has set a goal of pursuing integrated waste management and circular economy approaches to help countries and cities advanced climate development waste hierarchy and circular economy principles. These have yet to be adequately mainstreamed into many banks supported country strategies and operations. I have with me today. Dr steve fletcher, professor of Ocean policy and Economy and director of the Global Plastics Policy Center at the University of Portsmouth.
He's a member of the International Resource Panel, an expert in plastics and ocean policy and has worked extensively with the United Nations family of ocean and biodiversity conventions. Steve, welcome to what have we learned. Thank you Jeff, it's great to be here now. You are a member of the team that prepared the I. G. Evaluation of World Bank Group.
Support for Solid waste management and obviously focusing on the challenges presented by plastic waste from your perspective, how effective do you think we've been when it comes to helping lower income countries manage plastic waste? I think this isn't just a World Bank issue that this is an issue for for governments and development banks around the world really, I think it's probably fair to say the the vast majority of the plastics pollution problem in the world is faced by poorer countries.
What we tend to find in poorer countries is that the solid waste management systems there are just not as developed as they need to be to cope with the sheer volume of waste, including plastic waste that is being produced both by the country itself, but also in some circumstances, plastic waste that is imported into poor countries from more developed countries. And that's incredibly problematic.
So what we see in poorer countries is very low levels of formal waste collection, very low levels of sorting of waste into different waste streams and then relatively low levels of of recycling or reuse. And that results in significant open dumpsites. And as an approach to to get rid of some of that waste, a lot of open burning of the waste. And as you probably know, burning plastic is extremely toxic.
And there are some estimates that I can't really confirm myself, but there's some estimates that are out there that up to one million people per year die in developing countries from the toxic effects of mismanaged plastic waste. So that could be through ingestion. So the plastic entering the food chain or through inhalation. So, breathing in the smoke from burned plastic, which is pretty unacceptable.
So there's a real of chronic health and environmental crisis for millions of people in the global South who are living in some of the poorest conditions anyway, let let alone the pollution they're having to face. So the waste management system in large parts of the global South and particularly in urban areas is just not up to the job of dealing with the sheer volume of waste that's being created in those places.
Now, just to take a step back and maybe the distinction between recycling and reusing is important. Poor households can be incredibly innovated in reusing materials much more so than a lot of us in more developed countries. So is the problem largely on the lack of facilities for recycling side. The way I sometimes think about it, Jeff is is to think of somebody sitting under a waterfall of waste just drenching them in waist.
And that's the situation for many poorer countries and that the amount of waste being generated is so high that even with the most imaginative and innovative way of dealing with waste through re use, it's impossible to cope with the volume of waste that's being generated. And the same with recycling in a way, I mean, a lot of plastic and a lot of other types of ways to can be recycled.
The challenge is, how do you extract the recyclable material out of the waste streams and how do you then transport that material to a suitable recycling facility? And is there even a market for that recycled material once the material has been recycled? Because at the moment, particularly the plastics industry, virgin plastic is still cheaper than recycled plastic.
So there's no real incentive within the product manufacturing industry, in many parts of the world to shift towards recycled plastics. Some countries are starting to place minimum recycled content targets on plastic products, which means that product designers and the manufacturers of products containing plastic have to source recycled plastic to go into their products. And that helps build the market for recycled material.
It also gives confidence to investors to invest in recycling plants where there is a lot of recyclable material that's currently not being used, but until all of those things are in place, it's really difficult to shift the system towards recycling because any one of those things by themselves don't really change the game sufficiently to make recycling a profitable and worthwhile activity, even though, you know,
most of us around the world would think recycling is the best thing to do to kind of reuse the material and not let it flow out of the economy to retain the financial value, but also the carbon value of those items. But it's unfortunately very hardheaded economic business recycling and it has to turn a profit. Could you describe to non experts like myself, the concept of a circular economy approach?
Yeah, of course, Jeff. So, I think sometimes it's best to think about a circular economy, in contrast to the type of economy that we have in most countries right now, which is a more linear economy. In a linear economy, we take resources out of the ground or out of the sea wherever they come from. We create products from those resources, we sell them to other businesses or to other people. Those products are used in various ways at the end of their useful life, they become waste.
And at the moment, in a linear economy, those items of waste end up in landfill sites or incinerated or they leak into the environment in some way as some form of pollution. And what we have now is plastic being found everywhere in the world's environments, from the top of mount Everest to the bottom of the deepest ocean trench and everywhere in between.
In contrast to that, a circular economy is where the resources that we produce once they've been used there, then used again, they re circulate in the economy time after time. And the idea is that it's a very low waste and low pollution economy. So that has some interesting implications for how we think about products and how we design products.
So instead of designing products that we're happy to see end up in landfill, for instance, we have to design products differently to make sure that they are recyclable or that recyclable components of them can be taken out of the products. So, imagine a huge flow of plastic products entering the economy. Some of those plastic products will be things that we don't actually need.
So we can reduce plastics entering the economy in that way, just by simply saying no, by by not creating the products that we don't need. And we can set criteria for that to identify what those products are, then we can look at products that contain plastic that don't need to contain plastic. And we can try and substitute out the plastic for some other form of material that's more sustainable. And we would do life cycle assessments to make sure that we did choose the right materials.
So we're simply taking plastics out of the economy through substitution. And we're taking plastics out of the economy by simply choosing products and designs that use less plastic. So we now imagine a smaller flow of plastic entering the economy because we've taken out all the all the unnecessary stuff basically. So we then say to the remaining plastics which must be necessary in some way, we must actually need this plastic.
So what we do then is say, well, actually, well let's try and keep that plastic in the economy as long as possible. So we then do everything we can to circulate that plastic in the economy. So that's where we get into the recycling, where we get into re use type approaches there.
So really in a sense that there's kind of three steps 31 is two, reduce the amount of plastic entering the economy as much as possible and by the way that includes plastic that can't be recycled, can't be reused and that's toxic to people or nature. We should get rid of all that straight away. So we have a much smaller flow of plastic in that's reduced flow of plastic, we circulate as much as possible.
And that's why in the circular economy model we'd need less recycling infrastructure because we're dealing with much less plastic waste. So the transition to a circular economy creates huge business opportunities to think about how we design products differently and in effect design out pollution from the economy.
The I. G. Report made a number of recommendations, including the need to streamline the waste hierarchy and strengthen circular economy approaches within bank group work and strengthen the banks convening power in this space to coordinate siloed efforts among multiple organizations. How might the World Bank and other development institutions work together to implement these recommendations?
Yeah. That that's that's a tough question, Jeff I think there's probably I would say global recognition that the transition to a circular economy is critical to solving a whole load of the world's problems, not just around waste management or plastic pollution, but also, you know, tackling climate change and dealing with biodiversity loss as well, using our resources more efficiently.
Using less virgin material, be it plastic or or anything is all going to make for a more resource efficient, less polluting less climate damaging global economy. So there's a question therefore why isn't that transition happening as quickly as we needed to because the situation is urgent. Right. You know, we were, you know, having a nice conversation here, but actually the situation is is really, really urgent and requires immediate action.
And so I would say offering some form of collective global leadership to push the transition to a circular economy hard, push it hard and get it, get it embedded into the investment strategies of all the major development banks to get it at the front and center in national Development Plans and make sure that that is then filtered down into specific industrial or activity sectors within national economies. So that could be plastic, so it could be tourism or it could be, you know, anything else.
But really to try and embed that at the heart of everything that we do, really, if you were to come up with an additional recommendation to include in the I. G. Report some way of making the World Bank Group more effective in its support for developing countries to manage plastic waste. What would you recommend?
I think Jeff if I were to reflect on on that point, it's a difficult question first of all, but I think to reflect on that point I would really focus on the urgency and scale of the problem. Some recent research came out that showed that the response by countries and businesses to the rising rate of plastic pollution Will only reduce the increase in pollution by 7% by 2040. That's only slowing the increase by 7%.
We will still see huge growth in plastic pollution between now and 2040 with the current level of policies. So what I really fail to see is any sense of match up between the scale of the problem and the scale of the response that's currently in place. And so I'm not really sure this is a direct recommendation to the World Bank but it's to inject urgency into the efforts that are genuinely being made and are well intended to solve the global plastics problem.
And again I think it does come to taking responsibility and leadership in a way and this is a global problem. So we would be looking to global institutions to really drive that forward and in fact if we we have we have hope you'll be glad to know at the last U. N. Environment Assembly there was an agreement reached by countries on a mandate for a legally binding instrument to end plastic pollution. The text of this agreement needs to be developed by the end of 2020.
For the agreement should incorporate all types of plastic, it should focus on circular treatment where possible of plastics and it's looking at pollution of its looking at plastic pollution of all types, not just ocean plastic pollution. And I think it's probably fair to say there's a strong push from the international community and from a series of progressive businesses for this global agreement to really change the game when it comes to plastic pollution.
And I think what that global agreement really needs to do is take on board the recommendations of the report that we produced for the World Bank Group. And really think about the idea of of leadership and think about the idea of convening a coalition to achieve global change because I don't think anything less than that will be sufficient in this case. Are you optimistic? I am optimistic actually. I'm optimistic that enough people in positions of influence want this to happen.
And I'm seeing very little obvious pushback. I'm sure there is pushback. I'm sure there are vested interests who are very keen to push back on a global agreement to reduce plastic pollution because it has a whole series of implications for the economy and economies around the world. But I find it hard to accept this current situation where we know that ecosystems are incredibly threatened by plastic pollution and poor waste practices.
People are dying as a result of mismanaged waste and you know, open burning of plastics and and the climate is suffering even more than it is already through the mismanagement of plastic waste. So, so none of those things are really acceptable. And so, you know, we need a global solution to address that. And the process to develop a legally binding global agreement to end plastic pollution is the best hope that we have on the table at the moment. And right now until it's proven otherwise.
I am pretty optimistic that there is the political will to drive through an ambitious agreement. I wish we had more time to talk. I hope our listeners have learned at least half as much as I have uh during our chat. Thank you. We've been listening to dr steve fletcher, professor of Ocean Policy and Economy. This has been what have we learned? The I. G. Podcast and I'm Jeff Schelsky, your host.
We've been discussing the independent evaluation groups recently published report, transitioning to a circular economy and evaluation of the World Bank Group. Support from Municipal Solid Waste Management. You can find the report at the I E G website i e G dot World Bank Group dot org. Where you can also subscribe to this podcast and future podcasts for listening on your favorite platform. This is what have we learned, i e g podcast and I'm your host, Jeff lipsky. I wish everyone well.