A river full of trash, not enough cash
They started it and now they want it to stop. They march on the streets, screaming and choking, asking for plans, asking for change; nothing strange.
Waste management is a growing problem for many countries alike, developing or developed, however governments allocate most of their budgets for issues they deem more important than the environment.
Proper waste control drives investments though, through fresher environments and better legislations, waste can be minimized and a fresher atmosphere flourishes. Lebanon and the United Kingdom are of those two disparaging economies challenged by waste mismanagement.
Take one: Lebanon
Lebanon released their first budget in 12 years during 2017, when the government started facing external pressures to reform the economy and cover deficits as a way to attract more capital. Today, according to World Bank, Lebanon is dubbed the third most indebted country in the world with a debt-to-GDP ratio of 150 percent.
Despite a rubbish crisis that hit Lebanon to the bone back in 2015, the government’s budget, which was released earlier this April, does not demonstrate ways waste management will be handled except that the projected expenditure was £18.2mil out of the £12.27bn total expenditure; only one of one thousand.
Considering that Transparency International ranks Lebanon in the 20th percentile in terms of transparency, it doesn’t come as a surprise when the budget does not explicitly explain funds for waste management. The budget is not necessarily complete without assessing and prioritising the problems the population faces, the rubbish crisis being one of them. When citizens take to the streets as an outcry to many health concerns, the government is invested in a different agenda.
Environment crying, government smiling
Lama Fakih, Human Rights Watch Deputy Director of Middle East and North Africa, said the government stepped in the right direction by investing in an additional £15mil to rehabilitate open dumping in the country, but resources are still insufficient to deal with the crisis as a whole.
The funds are there, spending is happening, but not to increase environmental protection, but rather increase mismanagement.
“Look at what is happening in the country while the environment is not the top priority. There is a lot of mismanagement, even if there is spending in certain sectors, but the spending is misused because nothing is changing in terms of waste management,” said Samar Khalil, American University of Beirut’s Environmental and Chemical Safety Officer.
Even though mismanagement exists, researchers speculate that the waste file is in the government’s agenda but not to solve the crisis, but rather make use of it as a cash machine.
The government advertises sorting, incineration and recycling in their strategy but what it actually has in mind is expanding sea filling with waste and building over it, as a way to bring in further investments since the price of land in coastal areas are more expensive, said Elias Azzi, PhD student at KTH Sweden’s Department of Sustainable Development, Environmental Sciences and Engineering.
Decentralisation: the new law
A few months following the release of the budget, the Lebanese parliament passed the Integrated Solid Waste Management Law in September, but whether it will target the problem or not is still a concern.
According to Khalil, the legislation is too loose for a country with an ongoing rubbish crisis that needs stricter targets for waste minimisation. The law stipulates that municipalities are responsible for waste reduction, even though it must be a function of the central government, who holds the economic incentives, tools, as well as the ability to liaise with the industrial sector, which municipalities cannot do.
“If you are giving municipalities a free pass to do whatever they want with the waste, open burning or whatnot, without guidelines, this is not the right decentralisation,” she said.
Lebanon is a very small country, yet has 1008 municipalities; one for every 10 kilometers squared on average. Khalil said that results in a lack of the ability to control third-party monitoring of waste as well as implementing the economies of scale.
Municipalities require methods for financial sustainability, such as the freedom to add taxes on waste collection and treatment, which had been in action, prior to the new law.
Other methods include extended producer responsibility, which limits production companies from using resources that harm the environment; applied in countries like the UK.
Take two: UK
Even though rubbish is not piled on the streets of London, per se, the situation in the UK is quite similar when looking at spending cuts in local governments. Earlier in March, the National Audit Office assessed the financial sustainability of English local authorities demonstrating that spending on services such as waste management has plunged by about 20 percent in the past 8 years, while expenditure has fallen by around a third as well.
Exporting rubbish: reason
Previously, the UK exported a large portion of plastic and paper waste to China to boost their production economy. However, the Chinese government recently implemented an import ban, which is causing the UK to go two steps back with local incineration and landfilling, and the government is not responding strictly enough.
The year’s budget declared Environment, Food and Rural Affairs department’s resource spending; money for administration costs and daily resources, at £1.6bn and capital spending; money for investment and future growth, at £0.6bn for the next year.
Not much has changed for waste management from previous years despite this drastic change, making waste management lower on the government’s agenda like Lebanon.
In response to the single-use plastic waste crisis, the government announced a £20 mil funding for plastics and waste innovation and a tax on plastic packaging with less than 30 percent recyclables, which will be in place starting 2022.
The budget also read that the government has a long-term plan to maximise the amount of waste sent out for recycling rather than incineration and landfilling, but will not implement a tax on incineration unless their current ambitions for waste are not achieved.
The alternative
Looking ahead, if governments assess the way budgets can enforce new technologies such as introducing compostable packaging, local economies can work better while satisfying the population’s need for a cleaner environment and less rubbish.
When products are imported from abroad recycling becomes a difficult task because the material needs to be exported to the original production center for effective reuse, which is an underlying issue with the Chinese ban, said Azzi.
Yes it may cost more short-term but drive more investment long-term. They started it, now they can make it stop.
