6. Appropriate solutions

This transcript has been edited for clarity and concision. Names and technical terms have been corrected, and webinar administration, poll mechanics, repetition and false starts have been removed. The substance of the conversation has not been changed.

Zoë Lenkiewicz: Welcome everybody, and thank you for joining us. In our last Built to Last session, Pushkar Pradhan showed that a strong evidence base does much more than support operations. Used transparently, data can build trust with citizens and strengthen the case for finance, whether from government, donors, EPR funds or credit schemes. His advice was also reassuringly practical: do not wait for perfect data. Start small, use existing tools where possible and collect what is useful and affordable. Keep the outcome in sight – cleaner streets and healthier communities through more reliable waste services – then work backwards to identify the decisions and evidence you need. That brings us neatly to today’s foundation.

Evidence should help us compare genuine options and avoid expensive mistakes, but even with good data, we still have to decide what to do. Built to Last explores Global Waste Lab’s Seven Foundations of a Resilient Waste System, developed through field experience and research for UNEP’s Global Waste Management Outlook 2024. The series is running up to the ISWA World Congress in London in November, where Global Waste Lab is a Knowledge Partner. The Chartered Institution of Wastes Management has endorsed the series for continuing professional development. Today we focus on appropriate solutions.

We often use the word “solution” to mean a piece of technology or infrastructure, but a vehicle, facility or digital platform only works as part of a wider system. For this session, I have grouped the foundation into three practical tests. First, define the problem and the outcome. What are we trying to change, for whom, and what would success actually look like? Second, look at the whole system around it. What waste are we dealing with and at what scale? What is already in place? What would it take for the solution to work safely and sustainably, including what happens to anything left over? Third, test whole-life viability.

Can the solution be operated, paid for, maintained, repaired and adapted after the initial funding and enthusiasm have passed? Appropriate does not mean cheap or low-tech. It means fit for purpose. Because every context is different, a solution that works brilliantly in one place may fail completely in another. It is my absolute pleasure to introduce Lakshmi Menon, Head of Impact at CleanHub. Lakshmi brings a practical perspective on how waste collection and recovery models interact with local conditions, operational realities and credible impact.

She is joining us to move the conversation beyond whether a technology can work to the more important question of whether the overall solution fits the place, the people and the system expected to sustain it. Lakshmi, thank you for joining us and bringing our third foundation to life.

Lakshmi Menon: Thank you so much, Zoë and Swetha, for this opportunity. I am very glad to be here, and thank you all for joining. The images on my first slide show waste collection in different parts of the world: one in Europe, a CleanHub project in a small coastal town, and a community collection in East Africa. They are all collecting post-consumer waste, but the scale and the solutions are very different. Why do we have different solutions to what appears to be the same problem? One answer lies in the data. Studies from around the world show that in many developing countries, a large proportion of the municipal waste stream is food or other organic waste, while the recyclable fraction is smaller.

In developed countries, food and organic waste may account for around 30 to 40 per cent, while recyclables can account for up to 50 per cent. A collection system works better when there are supply chains to process and recycle the material, so differences in waste composition and markets help explain why different places need different solutions. We often ask how to choose the best solution and whether a model can be standardised and scaled. We put a great deal of effort into identifying a problem and building a solution, so naturally we would like to take that solution somewhere else and start again. But it is rarely that simple.

I will look at five parts of building an appropriate solution: needs assessment, technology, infrastructure, resource planning and partnerships. A needs assessment begins with understanding the current situation. In one coastal project in Kerala, we knew that the state provided a collection service and assumed it would be operating locally, even if it was not working very well. When we assessed the situation, however, we found there was effectively no collection. The local topography created challenges, and many residents were away during the day when the collection team visited. Had we assumed that the system worked as it did in neighbouring places, we would have designed the wrong solution.

Instead, the project used a locally based collection team that could offer more flexible collection times. These may seem like small details, but they determine whether a service works. A needs assessment also helps us anticipate future growth. What happens in the first year as participation increases? What will happen after five years? How long will external support continue? When will local infrastructure or new skills be needed? It is also an opportunity to involve the community. When people are asked what they need, they understand that the approach is not simply being imposed from outside. That changes their relationship with the project and can strengthen participation.

The final point I want to stress is the need to review the assessment periodically. We often complete one assessment at the beginning and continue using the same knowledge. Meanwhile, the community changes. Its first challenge may be the absence of collection, but later it may face a new problem such as e-waste. Needs and evidence therefore have to be reviewed. Technology is another important part of the solution, but we must ask what it is solving. In India, for example, we sometimes see reverse vending machines designed to collect PET bottles. If nobody has explained which bottles the machine accepts or what happens next, people try to insert different materials and the system can fail at the first attempt.

In another context, a well-established semi-formal PET recycler may already hold good records on inputs, costs, moisture and other factors because PET is such a widely traded material. Introducing new technology purely to capture data may add no value. We have to ask what the technology is for and choose it at the right scale. Technology does not only mean software. Machinery is technology too. A machine used successfully in one municipal ward cannot automatically be replicated in another if the second location has wetter material and the conveyor cannot cope with the additional moisture. We need to pause and understand the local conditions. We should also ask who owns the data and the assets.

Technology is often expensive and may be introduced by a funder or partner. Clarifying ownership helps us build a better partnership and a longer-term plan for the operation. Then there is maintenance. What happens after the initial funding period? Are the skills and resources available locally? We see machinery lying unused because a small part cannot be serviced, the relevant skills are unavailable or a replacement must be imported. These are often costs for which nobody has budgeted once the funding ends. Technology should support operational efficiency, not replace it.

A sophisticated application may collect data, but if it cannot work offline and staff have to enter a month’s records later when they reach an internet connection, information will be lost. Good technology can help a good operation, but it cannot compensate for a process that does not work. Infrastructure should also be designed with the future in mind. Modular design is useful. You may not have the funding to build everything today, but you can still plan the larger system, allocate enough space and anticipate the electricity, water and other services that will be needed as it grows. Retrofitting later is often more difficult and expensive. At one facility in hot southern India, we chose insulated roofing.

It was more expensive at the time, but it was a decision that had to be made during construction. It would not have been realistic to replace the entire roof later when more money became available. We also need to plan for a growing workforce and future compliance. A small organisation may initially be given some leeway, but as it grows, people rightly expect proper rest areas, washrooms, prayer rooms and other facilities appropriate to the local context. You cannot discover later that there is no space for them. Resource planning includes financial, human and infrastructure needs. Financial planning should allow for expected and unexpected risks, including climate risks.

Heat stress and water stress already affect this sector. We must also consider market linkages. It is not enough to plan for material coming into a facility without knowing where the outputs will go. Human resource planning is not only about recruitment. It includes skills, social compliance and staff welfare. A strong, well-supported workforce improves the whole operation. Safety planning is equally important. Waste management involves significant risks, and the cost of an accident can be far greater than the cost of preventing it. Finally, partnerships matter. A market may appear to contain many people selling the same products side by side, but it is better understood as an ecosystem.

A holistic solution allows the different parts of the waste system, including those providing forward and backward linkages, to thrive. Collaboration is a powerful way to learn. Organisations, experts, standards and processes already exist, and we can learn from people who have solved similar problems. Infrastructure design lessons, for example, can be learned from somebody who discovered them the hard way. Collaboration helps us learn faster and avoid repeating avoidable mistakes.

Zoë Lenkiewicz: That was fantastic, Lakshmi. I loved how you broke the issue into those different factors and talked us through each one. The example about daytime collections really stayed with me. In some communities, everyone is away at work during the day, so a service designed around daytime access will not work. It reminded me of a project I worked on in Indonesia. We were collecting food waste and farming black soldier fly larvae. In most of the villages, people kept chickens and were happy to buy the larvae as locally available chicken feed. One village, however, was more white-collar. Residents travelled down the mountain to work in government offices, and nobody kept chickens or fish.

The team adapted by building fishponds around its own agriculture and selling fish to the village. It was the same core solution, adjusted to make it appropriate for that specific context. Your point about reviewing assumptions periodically is also important. When we were researching the UNEP Global Waste Management Outlook, we found countries still working with waste data that was 10, 15 or even 20 years old. Populations may have increased substantially, many more people may have moved to cities and waste streams such as e-waste and textiles may have grown. Yet decisions are still being based on evidence from a generation ago. I also appreciated your point about thinking ahead for staff.

As a waste management service grows, it will need more people, and those people need adequate space for washrooms, prayer rooms and other facilities. That practical insight clearly comes from experience.

Zoë Lenkiewicz: A year or so ago, I wrote a LinkedIn post about this topic and many people joined the discussion. I revisited it this morning and wanted to pick out a few recurring points that connect closely with what Lakshmi has said. The first was spare parts. If you import a piece of equipment, it may get stuck in customs before it is even installed. Eventually it is built and begins operating, but then something breaks. Perhaps, as Lakshmi described, a conveyor is dealing with more moisture than expected and needs a new motor. That part has to be ordered and may again be delayed in customs. Does the team also have the technical skills to install it and prevent the same failure happening again?

Imported parts can be extremely expensive, particularly when sourced from Europe or elsewhere far away. The second issue was markets. Donors often invest in urban composting facilities because cities generate a great deal of food waste and composting appears to be an affordable way to divert it from dumpsites. But who in the city will buy the compost? Most residents do not have gardens and farming does not usually take place in dense urban areas. Without buyers, the revenue model fails. Operators begin making shortcuts, the quality of the compost falls and the facility may not last five years. Yet the response can be to build another composting facility rather than learn why the first one failed.

Energy requirements are another concern. Can the site obtain the power the equipment needs? Some machinery depends on uninterrupted electricity, which is simply not a reality in many places. The same applies to centralised facilities. They may work in Europe where road networks are reliable, but if roads wash away every rainy season, is it realistic to transport all the material to one site in a city? Finally, there is energy from waste. Incineration is used in parts of Europe where food waste is collected separately and the residual waste has a relatively high calorific value and low moisture content. Where the waste stream contains a high proportion of food waste, the situation is very different.

Food contains water, and water does not burn. That can make the technology inappropriate. Lakshmi, what are your reflections on those points?

Lakshmi Menon: I agree with those points. Starting with waste-to-energy, not every waste category is suitable for energy recovery. We also need to consider the strong informal recycling networks in many developing countries. High-calorific-value plastics may already be recovered and recycled, unlike in some high-income countries where more of that material remains in the residual stream. A large waste-to-energy plant can therefore affect the local recycling economy as well as the composition of its feedstock. It also requires substantial consolidation. That may be possible in a large city, but it becomes much harder when waste is spread over a wide area and has to be transported to a central facility.

Market linkages are crucial because no single entity usually manages the entire chain. A municipality may provide land or infrastructure; another organisation may collect; another may process; and somebody else must use or buy the output. You need to understand which part of the chain your solution addresses, how enough suitable material will reach it and where the resulting products and residuals will go. This is not always linear. If you wait until a perfect market exists, you may never begin collecting. But you also cannot tell a community that you will collect all its textiles today and stop tomorrow because there is no buyer.

The process has to be phased, with honest expectations and patient support from funders while operations and markets develop. The market may not be ideal at first. As the earlier webinars emphasised, do not wait for an ideal situation before starting. Begin with what is possible, but retain a clear design for the system you ultimately want. Spare parts and maintenance remain a constant struggle. Local operators are often very aware of their limited access to maintenance services and skilled technicians. The pressure to adopt a fashionable solution can come from outside. We spend a great deal of time educating communities, but we also need to help donors understand the practical gaps in the local context.

Funders are part of the ecosystem too.

Zoë Lenkiewicz: I love that point. Donor organisations can have high staff turnover, so lessons learned five years ago may disappear without good organisational and institutional memory. You also reinforced the message we heard from Mayor Bensouda and Pushkar: just start. The system will not be complete or perfect at the beginning, but you have to start somewhere, keep learning and keep building. Persevere, remain adaptable and pay attention to what the evidence is telling you. We have two related audience questions about including informal waste workers in places with poor mobile connectivity. How can technology be useful where people do not have reliable access to phones, data or the internet?

How can teams communicate, organise and collect information in that context?

Lakshmi Menon: Technology may not be the answer to everything at the current stage of a project. If informal waste workers need to collect information in a particular format, building that into the operational process is more important than immediately deciding that it must be entered on a phone. Where internet access is limited, information might be recorded offline and uploaded later. But first ask what the data is intended to achieve. Will it give waste workers better access to information or finance? Will it support better collection tools, safer working conditions or a sorting space? People are more likely to see value in collecting information when it leads to something useful for them and the system.

They may also suggest practical solutions themselves. Perhaps one person can collate the records on a particular day, or a locally workable process can be designed around the technology available. The answer will vary by context. If people do not have access to phones or the internet, maintaining a fully digital system may not be realistic. Paper-based records can be appropriate for a period. We should not lose sight of the value of having data, but the team responsible for collecting it needs to understand what it will do for them and for the service. My answer comes from particular experiences, and another context may require a different approach. That is the point: the solution has to fit the context.

Zoë Lenkiewicz: That is really helpful. When I started working in waste management, we did not have smartphones or sophisticated online databases. Services were delivered and records were kept using paper, and that can still work. Technology should be introduced when it adds value for people and the service. Many projects want to begin by building a dashboard, database or app. But much of waste management is the physical work of collecting, moving and sorting materials. An app can only go so far in enabling that. We have to remember what the service actually does and what is needed to make it reliable and provide good working conditions. Another audience question concerns source separation.

What are the needs and possibilities for asking households to separate food waste, dry recyclables and other material, and how does that affect resource recovery? Some systems collect mixed waste and sort it on conveyor belts, but that can be unhygienic and deeply unpleasant for workers. On the other hand, asking households to separate waste when they do not yet have a reliable collection service may be a step too far. It also takes sustained communication and trust. People may carefully separate their waste and then see it loaded into what appears to be one vehicle, without realising that the vehicle has separate compartments. Once trust is lost, it is very difficult to rebuild.

Lakshmi, what is your view on when and how source separation should be introduced?

Lakshmi Menon: For small and medium-scale operations, source separation is usually the best option. If all the material arrives mixed, a great deal of time and effort goes into sorting during collection or at the facility, and the work can be unhygienic. Very large systems may use machinery such as trommels and dryers to manage mixed municipal waste, but that is a different scale of operation. I have a personal example. I live in a small apartment complex in India, and although I work in waste management, persuading my own neighbours to separate their waste was extremely difficult. Friends in the sector often say that we can change the world but cannot change our own neighbourhoods. I kept raising the issue.

When the apartment management changed, a window of opportunity opened and I volunteered to help start the process. It is useful to communicate the expectation early and repeat it consistently, even while mixed waste is still being collected. At first, perhaps 20 or 30 per cent of residents will begin separating. Once that group changes its behaviour, others can start to follow. At a larger scale, the right time to introduce source separation depends on the operation. Without it, recovery can become much more expensive and a materials recovery facility may be difficult to manage. Ideally, as much material as possible should be separated before it reaches a conveyor or storage area.

The waste stream and intended process also matter. A food waste composting facility needs a clean organic input, so source separation is especially important. If a community says it can supply only mixed waste, the solution might include a small local sorting point. Alternatively, small composting units could keep organic material within the neighbourhood rather than transporting it elsewhere. These are context-specific choices, but earlier separation generally improves recovery, recycling, hygiene and the use of space.

Zoë Lenkiewicz: I completely agree. Source separation makes waste much easier to manage once it has been collected, but it does require significant work at the beginning. Starting with individual households is not always the best first step. It may make more sense to begin with large food waste generators such as hotels, canteens or government offices. That can provide enough consistent feedstock for composting or black soldier fly farming while allowing the team to learn how best to communicate with people about separation and waste prevention. Prevention remains important too.

These webinars have focused largely on what happens after waste has arisen, but waste managers also help communities and businesses prevent waste in the first place. I have one final question. If you had to choose one test that every council, donor or programme team should apply before approving a waste solution, what would it be?

Lakshmi Menon: I would ask about the larger vision for the solution and how it has been planned for this particular context. An ambitious, well-considered vision can be worth backing, but I would want to understand how thoroughly the problem has been examined and how clearly the proposed solution translates that understanding into practice.

Zoë Lenkiewicz: Perfect. I love that as a closing thought. Thank you again, Lakshmi, for such a valuable session and for sharing your expertise and experience so generously. This has been the third webinar in our seven-part Built to Last series. The next session focuses on inclusive engagement with Anna de Chavez, who led the Women’s Economic Empowerment activity within USAID’s Clean Cities, Blue Ocean programme. Anna has worked with remarkable people to ensure that waste systems put people at their heart, because ultimately it is people who sustain them. The remaining sessions will explore community asset recognition, climate integration and financial sustainability.

Please continue the conversation with us on LinkedIn, share your reflections and tell us what you would like us to ask future speakers.