2026 to 2047
The Global Journey
- 0
- Research completed
- 0
- Visit scheduled
- 6
- Research planned
- 6
- Future mission
- 21
- Cities on the roadmap
- 6
- Missions planned
Missions
Vietnam: formalisation and the informal trade
The first field mission. Two cities, chosen because the same national policy is being implemented under very different conditions in each.
Reached: Travel (1/10)Early 2027
Indonesia: what keeps a waste bank open
Built specifically to study durability rather than launch. We want to meet waste banks that closed, not only ones that are still open.
Reached: Travel (1/10)Mid 2027
Malaysia: capacity, trade and enforcement
A study of what recycling capacity is for, in a country that acquired a great deal of it very quickly and then changed the rules.
Reached: Travel (1/10)Mid 2027
Singapore: a system with no disposal option
The constraint is the subject. Singapore is studied for what extreme land scarcity forces a system to become.
Reached: Travel (1/10)Late 2027
Thailand: organic waste under a seasonal load
Closes the first season. Chosen because seasonal variation is a problem many Indian cities share for different reasons.
Reached: Travel (1/10)Late 2027
India: establishing the conditions
Not a study of India from outside. This mission establishes what any adapted model would have to survive, before the first pilot is designed.
Reached: Travel (1/10)2028
Countries
Southeast Asia
Vietnam
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.
Southeast Asia
Indonesia
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.
Southeast Asia
Malaysia
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.
Southeast Asia
Singapore
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.
Southeast Asia
Thailand
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.
East Asia
Japan
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.