Blog Posts: waste

While there's no silver bullet to solving our plastic problem, a new policy guide from WRI and UNEP offers countries a range of legal approaches to reducing plastic waste.

The take-make-waste model is driving the climate crisis and depleting the planet of much-needed resources. Here are 3 ways to transition toward circularity.

On average, almost two-thirds of urban residents across 15 cities in the global South lack access to safely managed sanitation, with access lowest in cities of South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Irrigation pumps could provide a more stable source of water for Kenyan farmers, but they currently cover only 6-8 percent of the land. Some farmers are gaining access to them through a novel source of power.

Pune's waste pickers used to be treated much like the garbage they collected. India's first worker-owned waste-pickers' cooperative elevated their status while cleaning up Pune's mountains of trash.

Most people blame consumers for the 1.3 billion tons of trash the world generates every year. The reality is that there are more systemic issues at play.

Water’s usability doesn’t need to end once it's flushed down the drain. Rather, India can see industrial and domestic wastewater as a valuable resource from which water, nutrients and even renewable energy can be extracted.

Being "thrifty" means spending one cent as if you have only half a cent. This is an old Chinese saying to warn people to handle affluence without forgetting about a potential crisis. Underlying this common sense is an ethic rooted in Chinese culture: wasting is bad.

President Xi Jinping has urged Chinese people to "build a thrifty society", because if we persist with our business-as-usual production and consumption pattern we would invite a resource and environmental crisis.

One "inconvenient truth" is that China uses about 20 percent of the total global energy to produce about 12 percent of the world GDP. The country's energy consumption per unit of GDP is 2.2 times that of the world average. A similar pattern is seen in the consumption of other resources such as steel, cement and other raw materials, as highlighted by State leaders and experts at the International Forum on Building Ecological Civilization hold in Guiyang, Guizhou province, last month. In doing so, the leaders indicated that huge amounts of energy could be saved in China by improving efficiency.