The report entitled “Private Sector Participation of Solid Waste Management Activities in Ibadan” provides Oyo State Government with recommendations to improve the technical, legal and institutional environment for the immediate, medium and the long term interventions in solid waste management. The outlined policy recommendations detailed in the full report aims to guide the Oyo State Government in identifying areas within the solid waste management sector that would improve efficiency from private sector participation.
Sustainable Innovation in Sport 2017
Timezone:
The Sustainable Innovation in Sport conference brings together key industry stakeholders and leading infuencers who are engendering positive environmental impact through sport.
The sport industry touches hundreds of millions of people globally every year, presenting an unparalleled opportunity to instigate sustainable innovation from within the sports teams, stadiums, governing bodies, ministries – all the way to individual fans’ behaviour.
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Morocco Lets Nothing Go To Waste
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Morocco looks at waste as a resource which can be better managed to fuel the economy and reduce environmental impacts.
- Supported by the World Bank, Morocco aims to increase the rate of recycled material to 20 percent by 2022, while improving the conditions of waste-pickers.
- Oum Azza, the Maghreb’s largest modern landfill facility, derives value from organic waste by tapping into biogas from decomposition.
Scavengers have always known there is value to be found in trash.Twelve years ago, when Milouda Haimar’s elderly husband became too ill to work, she turned to the trash mountain near her home. At night, when her six children were in bed, she would strap a flashlight over her headscarf and join other scavengers picking through the refuse of Rabat, the capital city of Morocco. The most valuable finds were copper, followed by aluminum, hard plastic containers and cardboard. Milouda says she could make about 120 to 250 Dirhams* a night, barely enough to provide for her family.
But the trash heap was unsafe. Men, women, elderly people and children competed for the best finds and went through the trash without gloves, in the rain and blinding sunshine, day and night. Moreover, the trash was located in an old quarry that operated without regulations or oversight from 1980 to 2007.
“It used to smell terrible, with streams of toxic leach flowing into the Bouregreg (the river that runs through Rabat). There were walls of black or white foam blocking the road at times” remembers Gerard Prenant, Director of the private operator that manages the Oum Azza waste management site.
Today, the Bouregreg estuary which discharges to the Atlantic Ocean, is clean enough to attract fishermen and tourists. And Milouda and her fellow trash-pickers have been relocated to a modern facility, the Oum Azza waste management site, where they operate a one-of-a-kind recycling cooperative. This is partly thanks to Morocco’sProgramme National des Déchets Ménagers, through which the Government intends to increase the rate of material collected and recycled from 5 percent today to 20 percent by 2022 while improving the conditions of waste pickers. This Program has been supported by four consecutive World Bank Municipal Solid Waste Development Policy Loans (DPL).
The private operator that runs the Oum Azza site says it is the largest modern sorting and landfilling facility in the Maghreb area, taking in about 850,000 tons of refuse per year. It sponsored the creation of a cooperative and built a sorting facility to help people like Milouda who used to work at the makeshift site, continue earning money but in safer and more organized conditions. About 150 people belong to the cooperative, of which 22 are women.
The members are organized in teams that pick out different types of recyclables on a conveyor belt. “Everyone is paid the same monthly salary of 2,620** Dirhams a month,” explains Yassine Mazzout, President of the Cooperative At-Tawaffouk (which means Success in Arabic), and any excess profit is shared once a year according to the number of hours each one has worked. “Although I make a bit less money than before, there are other advantages,” says Milouda. Cooperative members receive health insurance, access to a bank account and a low mortgage.
The trash pickers also contribute to the business model. The on-site recycling plays an important role: by extracting about 2,200 tons of solid trash per year for resale and turning about 100,000 tons of green garden waste into compost, the cooperative reduces the volume of trash that needs to be buried and prolongs the site’s life expectancy. Yassine would like to recycle more waste and help trash pickers in other cities, like Agadir, get organized.
" What Morocco is doing is exemplary. They are looking at waste as a resource rather than trash. The Oum Azza site is a promising model of what other landfills can and should look like with the roll out of the government program. Combining recycling, value chains and jobs is a good recipe to make the dump story a success story. ", Maria Sarraf, Lead Environmental Economist at the World Bank
The Oum Azza landfill is also set up to derive value from organic waste, which represents a large share of the trash in Morocco (about 60%, compared to 30% in Europe), by tapping into the biogas that results from the process of decomposition. Tubes and spigots will one day convey gas to a nearby cement factory furnace. At the time of the site visit, in October 2015, the operator running Oum Azza was waiting for the adoption of a decree that would allow it to sell excess electricity generated by the biogas to the national grid. Shortly after, the decree was adopted as part of a package of reforms supported by the World Bank Inclusive Green Growth DPL.
For now, the gas is flared, converting methane, a gas that has a very high greenhouse warming effect, into carbon, which is relatively less polluting for the earth’s climate. Oum Azza will be the first landfill in Morocco to sell Carbon Emission Reductions through the Clean Development Mechanism program supported by the World Bank. During its lifetime, the site will generate about half a million tons of CO2 emission reductions through the capture of landfill gas and its use to generate electricity on site.
The landfill operator also has plans to create green compost from garden waste and to sell dry and pulverized trash to cement makers. “Our job is to manage waste, and our interest is in having the least possible trash to bury,” says Prenant.
“What Morocco is doing is exemplary. They are looking at waste as a resource rather than trash. The Oum Azza site is a promising model of what other landfills can and should look like with the roll out of the government program. Combining recycling, value chains and jobs is a good recipe to make the dump story a success story” says Maria Sarraf, Lead Environmental Economist at the World Bank.
This blog post was originally posted here.
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Reducing Food Loss and Waste
About 24 percent of all calories currently produced for human consumption are lost or wasted. This paper examines the implications of this amount of loss and waste, profiles a number of approaches for reducing it, and puts forth five recommendations for how to move forward on this issue. "Reducing Food Loss and Waste" is the second installment in the series that forms the foundation of the “World Resources Report 2013-14: Creating a Sustainable Food Future.”
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimates that 32 percent of all food produced in the world was lost or wasted in 2009. This estimate is based on weight. When converted into calories, global food loss and waste amounts to approximately 24 percent of all food produced. Essentially, one out of every four food calories intended for people is not ultimately consumed by them.
Food loss and waste have many negative economic and environmental impacts. Economically, they represent a wasted investment that can reduce farmers’ incomes and increase consumers’ expenses. Environmentally, food loss and waste inflict a host of impacts, including unnecessary greenhouse gas emissions and inefficiently used water and land, which in turn can lead to diminished natural ecosystems and the services they provide.
Big inefficiencies suggest big savings opportunities. We estimate that if the current rate of food loss and waste were cut in half―from 24 percent to 12 percent―by the year 2050, the world would need about 1,314 trillion kilocalories (kcal) less food per year than it would in the business-as-usual global food requirements scenario described in The Great Balancing Act, the first installment of this World Resources Report working paper series. That savings--1,314 trillion kcal--is roughly 22 percent of the 6,000 trillion kcal per year gap between food available today and that needed in 2050. Thus, reducing food loss and waste could be one of the leading global strategies for achieving a sustainable food future.
In this paper, we profile a subset of approaches to reducing food loss and waste that experts suggest are particularly practical and cost-effective, that could be implemented relatively quickly, and that could achieve quick gains. We also recommend a number of cross-cutting strategies to further galvanize commitment to reducing food loss and waste.
Reducing Food Loss and Waste is the second in a series of working papers that we’ll roll out over the course of a year. Each subsequent paper will take a detailed look at a potential solution that could help achieve a sustainable food future. These installments will set the foundation for and culminate in the World Resources Report 2013-2014: Creating a Sustainable Food Future. To learn more about the series and sign up to receive updates, visit the World Resources Report website.
Read the report.
This blog post was originally posted here.
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A Sustainable Food System Could Be A Trillion-Dollar Global Windfall
A new report makes a strong bottom-line case for more earth-friendly farming — and eating — practices. A more sustainable approach to our world’s food production could be a massive economic boon, a new report out this month claims.
Our planet has a very long way to go toward building a food system that is truly and genuinely sustainable, but that work, if done correctly, could come with a massive reward.
That’s the conclusion of a new report released this month by the Business and Sustainable Development Commission, an international nonprofit hoping to make a strong bottom-line case for industries to take a more earth-friendly approach to their businesses.
In its flagship report, the commission appears to have done just that.
The report claims that taking a sustainable approach to the world’s food and agriculture challenges, like hunger, food waste and environmental degradation, could lead to new business opportunities totaling an annual $2.3 trillion — and 80 million new jobs — by 2030, based on an analysis of of industry reports and academic literature.
That economic impact would be a sevenfold return on an annual investment of $320 billion, according to the report.
[video: http://videos.vidible.tv/prod/2016-07/11/5783e9cd1c6899497d7adf09_853x480_v1.mp4?DHp_oQA71_V5AW6c6Pqq_Zb76eeoo2G6wOMtVW4-w1rEabuV0K4Nht9IVHL7WnoZ]
What exactly is meant by a sustainable approach that could achieve this, though? The approach considered by the report is one outlined by the United Nations’Sustainable Development Goals, or Global Goals, which were released last year with the aim of reducing poverty, hunger and inequality around the world by 2030.
The SDG agenda calls for significant shifts in how our food is produced, processed and sold, including growing and consuming more produce and meats that have a reduced environmental impact, embracing sustainable farming practices like low- and no-till agriculture and reducing food waste at both the production and retail level.
Such shifts, the report’s author Fraser Thompson said, aren’t just “pie-in-the-sky” daydreaming or, as some critics of the SDGs have put it, byproducts of a “worthless” “high school wish list.”
“It is important to stress that our business opportunities are based on currently available technologies where there is an existing model in operation in some part of the world,” Thompson told HuffPost by email. “We deliberately took this approach to ensure that the insights from the report were feasible for business.”
According to the report, these global shifts would have the bulk of their impact in developing countries — over 90 percent of the forecast job creation would take place on the continents of Africa and Asia due to the large share of arable land and high future consumption growth, Thompson said.
But there are significant opportunities for the U.S. to seize as well.
The three top areas for possible economic growth tied to a more sustainable food system in the U.S. are largely focused on the consumption side of the food value chain — reducing consumer food waste, reformulating food products to be healthier, and helping consumers switch their diets away from resource-intensive products like beef and toward other proteins like poultry, pork, fish and vegetarian diets.
There are already promising examples of the sort of sustainable practices the commission would like to see other industry leaders emulate in play throughout the world.
One of them Thompson named is Winnow, a London-based startup that is battling food waste through a “smart meter” that connects commercial kitchen operations to the cloud and allows chefs to record and analyze all the food that doesn’t get put to use.
Chefs then use that information to tweak their production practices and reduce their kitchens’ food waste by 50 percent or more. The company’s work was recognized with a Guardian Sustainable Business award earlier this year.
The key, Thompson argues, to harnessing the impressive windfall they’ve forecast will simply be scaling up ideas like Winnow’s kitchen meter. That will require buy-in from a broad swath of businesses and consumers alike.
BSDC chair Lord Mark Malloch-Brown told HuffPost by email he is hopeful the research presented in the report should help industry players connect the dots.
“It will require hard work by individual entrepreneurs and companies to translate this into specific businesses that earn financial returns in line with the economic opportunity we have identified,” Brown, former UN deputy secretary-general, wrote. “That’s hard long-term work but what we have sought to show is that the prize is worth the effort.”
Still, businesses have been slow to take action toward achieving the SDGs and consumers also appear skeptical, according to recent surveys.
According to Thompson, though, we don’t have much longer to wait before taking action toward meeting the world’s increasing food demands, which the UN has warned will grow by 60 percent in 2050.
“The challenges facing the food system in a ‘business-as-usual’ scenario should not be underestimated,” Thompson added. “Addressing the current undernourished population and the rapid demand for food and feed – and competing demand for fuel – will require a radical rethink of past practices.”
This article was originally posted on The Huffington Post.
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UNEYAI implements Cleanup and Solid Waste Management Project
The United Nations Environmental Youth Action Initiative (UNEYAI Liberia) in collaboration with the LBS Community leadership, were able to successfully implement the Community Cleanup and Solid Waste Management (CC-SWM) Project in the LBS Community on Saturday, October 1, 2016, with over ten (10) community volunteers and some community leaders who participated in our Pre-Training and Community Cleanup exercises on October 1, 2016.
UNEYAI Liberia Country Director, Ms. Sangaye Kweegbo was able to gave an overview of UNEYAI Liberia establishment, objectives, leadership, and the organization thematic areas of work, while Mr. Thomas P. Mitchell, Program Director of UNEYAI Liberia elaborated on the organization programs that are designed, with more emphasis on the Community Cleanup and Solid Waste Management (CC-SWM) Project.
The Community Cleanup and Solid Waste Management (CC-SWM) Project is a community based environmental campaign that inspires and empowers communities from every corner to clean up and conserve their environment. The LBS Community was our first target and we hope to implement the CC-SWM Project into other affected communities
