Chapter 5. Rethinking the public waste service
II.
What waste management model to support policy?
The purpose of identifying the levers that enable a shift towards waste valorisation is to give waste management actors an overview of opportunities. Clearly, each situation is different, each territory has its own specificities, and it would be pointless to seek to systematically apply the same levers across the board. Three main models emerge, all in fact implemented in parallel in each of the cities, but with different objectives and applied to different populations and waste types.
1. A centralised, unified and linear model The first model foregrounded by the cities studied is at the same time centralised, unified and linear. It adopts the same goals as those generally set by global North countries with a focus on public health objectives. It aims to remove waste from the urban space to prevent health risks for residents and, as far as possible, also control the disposal of this waste to reduce its environmental impacts. A model that mimics global North practices The actors implementing this model aim for waste management that is: Centralised in the hands of a single actor at the metropolitan scale in order to compensate for inadequate management of the urban area in most of the cases studied. This helps to gradually strengthen the municipalities. If no metropolitan authority exists (the case in four of the six cities), the state and its ministries take direct responsibility for management. This thrust for centralisation sometimes seem to reflect a wish to prevent the empowerment of potential political competitors at the local level. Unified, meaning that the same municipal public service is provided to all citizens. This corresponds to a vision of theoretical equality, offering the same door-to-door service to all. Linear, as the main objective remains to limit health risks and thus move waste away from the city. All waste streams converge towards a single sink – a (more or less controlled) disposal site – to avoid dispersing waste to sites not directly controlled by the central actor.
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