Countries

Waste management in a rapidly urbanising economy

Vietnam is urbanising and industrialising at speed, and its waste system is being rebuilt while it runs. Formal collection, an established informal recovery trade and new extended producer responsibility rules are arriving at the same time, in the same cities.

Community waste banks and archipelagic logistics

Indonesia has built one of the most widely replicated community recovery models in the world, the bank sampah, alongside the logistical problem of running waste systems across thousands of inhabited islands.

Industrial recycling capacity and imported material

Malaysia became a major destination for internationally traded plastic scrap after China closed its doors in 2018, then moved to restrict it. That sequence makes it an unusually clear place to study what recycling capacity is actually for.

A closed system with nowhere to put anything

Singapore has almost no land for disposal, which has forced a highly engineered system built around incineration with energy recovery and a single offshore landfill. It is the clearest example available of what severe land constraint does to waste policy.

Food waste, tourism and seasonal load

Thailand combines a large domestic food economy with tourism volumes that swing municipal waste loads sharply by season. Systems that work in March may not work in August.

Sorting as a civic habit

Japanese municipalities vary enormously in how finely they ask households to sort, and some of the most demanding schemes have held for decades. The interesting question is not the rules but the compliance.

Charging households by the kilo

South Korea prices household waste by volume and weight, including a national food waste separation requirement. It is one of the few places where the price signal reaches the individual household directly.

Circular economy as industrial policy

The Netherlands has set national circular economy targets and applied them hardest where the material volumes actually are: construction and demolition. It is a useful test of whether a target changes an industry.

Thirty years of producer responsibility

Germany has run packaging producer responsibility longer than almost anywhere, together with a deposit return scheme for beverage containers. Long-running systems reveal failure modes that new ones have not reached yet.

District heating and the incineration question

Sweden links waste incineration to district heating, which makes energy recovery genuinely useful and also creates a long-lived appetite for combustible material. Both halves of that sentence matter.

Enforcement without wealth

Rwanda restricted single-use plastic bags earlier and more strictly than most countries, at a much lower income level than the countries usually studied for it. That combination is the reason to go.

A research destination in its own right

India is studied here with the same framework as everywhere else, not treated only as the place findings are carried back to. It is a country of enormous scale where municipalities, businesses, communities and informal workers are already solving some of the largest resource problems anywhere — and where any imported model must survive informal-sector livelihoods, wide climatic and density variation, constrained municipal finance and that same scale.