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Starting Circularity in Developing Regions

We’ve always had trash as long as we’ve been a tool-making species, from rubbish piles left by prehistoric hunter-gatherers, to the refuse pits outside Athens or Rome. But how did we get to the point of making literal mountains of trash? How did we get to where every large city has mountains of trash outside of it? Yes there are obviously way more people now then there were in pre-industrial times, but we are making way more trash per person as well, and the trash we are making is far less able to break down and decompose. The industrial revolution greatly increased our production abilities, but then came the idea of increasing sales by making things disposable. Starting in the mid-1920s with the Phoebus Cartel for lightbulb manufacturers, and continuing on through the 30s, 40s, 50s the rise of planned obsolescence ensured that people would be buying more and more and more, and simply discarding their old stuff regardless of whether it was still usable or not. As things were expected to last a shorter amount of time, they were made more cheaply, and then were expected to last even less time. All throughout the 20th Century new methods and strategies were constantly being invented to sell more stuff, no matter the environmental cost, which almost no one even considered anyway.

I listen to old radio shows, and on some shows from the 70s I remember hearing advertisements for beer with a “special new packaging feature”, bottles that you didn’t have to pay a deposit on because you could simply throw them away and not turn them back in. Such incredible progress.

In order to make our economies actually sustainable long-term, we have to transform the economies of our world from linear economies to circular economies. The idea of a circular economy is that things aren’t simply sent to a landfill, but repaired and reused as much as possible and at the end of their life even the raw materials they are made from get reused to make other things. In order for materials to get reused they obviously can’t simply be dumped into a landfill, which means that “waste management” has to be done completely differently.

How can this kind of change even be started? How can a system that simply dumps all waste into landfills be transformed into one where materials get reused? Where do you even start on something like that? At first it sounds like something that would be incredibly difficult for a city in a developed or advanced region, and seemingly all but impossible for a city in a developing region. How could they even think about attempting something like that? But wait, what if projects that put them on the road to a circular economy could also help improve the health, wellbeing, and even economic prospects of the city? Is that possible?

An all-too-common theme in the cities of developing regions are the inadequacies in their waste management systems, due to which they are more likely to have large amounts of pollution in their environment in the form of litter and trash. The trash piles up, pervades the city and brings a sense of squalor to many people, rather than progress. A study by the World Health Organization in 2022 noted links between poor waste management and lowered well-being, including higher stress, feelings of annoyance or sadness, depression, anxiety, frustration, anger, lowered perceptions of personal safety and neighborhood solidarity, decreased social trust, increased antisocial behaviors and even lower quality of sleep. When large portions of the city or region have these issues, this will necessarily have an overall detrimental effect on the populace and depress personal initiative and community engagement.

All pretty downbeat, right?

Now, imagine that waste management becomes one of the highest priorities of some of these cities. Simply not having trash around in the streets, neighborhoods, and environments would be a huge psychological boost to the populace of the city and region. Now not everything could be recycled, but imagine if the waste were sorted as much as possible and those raw materials made available cheaply to local industry, rather than simply being thrown away. In addition to drastically improving the well-being of the residents and the impressions of visitors, it could seriously stimulate businesses who might make use of those materials. What an enormous potential impact on so many different areas. But how could that even be attempted? Where would you start? What would you tackle first? Metals? Plastics? Something else? Any large city generates extremely large amounts of trash. Sorting the metal, plastic, wood, or whatever out of that trash is a monumental effort. Attacking any of them pretty much requires sorting all of the trash anyway, and so there isn’t a great way to start. Is there some other thing or way you could start with that would make a big impact but not immediately require those massive sorting techniques and capabilities?

To start with, we should probably know what makes up the biggest part of our trash. It may surprise you, but the answer is food and other organic waste. In the US, for example, food waste makes up about 24% of what goes into our landfills. What about in developing regions? Counterintuitively, the lower the level of development in a region the higher the percentage of their landfill waste is food. The primary reason is that there is far less waste overall, so there is less packaging, less electronic waste, less of everything, but obviously food is still needed by everyone, so food waste simply makes up a higher percentage of the overall waste. Other factors could be due to less available refrigeration and less efficient transportation methods, resulting in a greater percentage of spoiled food. This organic waste generally makes up a whopping 53-57% of the waste going to landfills in these regions. When organic material goes into a landfill, rather than getting recycled in the normal natural cycles it gets contaminated by chemicals leaching from the other trash, which can then leach into groundwater contaminating it as well. Also the material decays, releasing large amounts of methane directly into the atmosphere, which is an extremely powerful greenhouse gas.

How could you separate out this organic waste from the rest of the trash? That seems like a pretty insurmountable task, but what if the food waste simply never got thrown away with the rest of the trash? What if the food waste could be sent elsewhere from the beginning? And let’s say you even could redirect that organic waste, what could be done with it?

Another area where developing regions tend to struggle is water quality. Without good waste management lakes, rivers, and even ground water get polluted, not only with trash, but also with industrial waste and leakage from unsanitary landfills. This water pollution can raise levels of sickness, lower the quality of life, lower tourism, and even lower potential business investment. If instead water quality was made a focus all of these areas could be improved. Waste management is intimately tied to water quality, and improving waste management will improve water quality, but perhaps there could be an even more interesting and productive relationship between the two.

As for what could be done with that organic waste, one possibility is to direct it to composting facilities. Those could turn the waste into organic material that can be used to enrich and fertilize local farms. The downsides are that these facilities need a large amount of area, the aerobic decomposition used can take a while, and they would generally need to be away from the city due to odors emitted during the composting. Another possibility is anaerobic decomposition, which not only happens much faster, but also can produce methane which can be captured and used or sold for electricity generation. And where are there normally anaerobic processing facilities? In wastewater treatment plants. They are designed to take in water and organic material, process it through anaerobic decomposition, capture the methane generated, and release clean water and organic material. Wastewater treatment plants might be able to help address both the water quality issues AND the waste management issues. Imagine the impact on a city if you could drastically improve water quality AND dramatically reduce the amount of solid waste needing to be processed and landfilled at the same time. How would you go about this?

The first step would be to greatly expand the wastewater treatment facilities of the city. Obviously you couldn’t just start sending all food waste down the drains to the current wastewater treatment facilities and expect them to be able to handle the increase in flow and organic material. Another step would be to improve the sewer systems. The culverts and pipes and pumps would all need upgraded to accept a larger flow of material. And how would it work once those things are in place? Would people just start throwing food down sink drains or toilets or something? Obviously garbage disposals are an option, but these are considerably less common in developing regions, plus what comes out of them still can be capable of causing blockages. Also, just raw food waste still requires a decent amount of processing in the wastewater treatment plant. How can we get food waste to the wastewater treatment plants without clogging up the pipes of the sewer system, and make it easier to process once it arrives there? One good solution might be to get pre-digesters installed in places with lots of food waste. What the heck is a pre-digester? Look on the site for Power Knot to get a good feel for them, but basically they are units that you throw food waste into, and within 24 hours they digest the food into a gray slurry that can smoothly flow into and through the sewer pipes. They come in varying sizes, and if these were installed in restaurants, grocery stores, markets, apartment buildings, and other places with a lot of food waste, these pre-digesters would pre-process the organic waste taking some of the load off of the wastewater treatment facilities. The use of these pre-digesters makes the processing of the organic waste through the treatment plants faster, potentially increasing the methane output once it gets there, and, perhaps most importantly, would also make the food waste more uniformly liquid, and so make it flow through the pipes of the sewer sytem fluidly and with far fewer issues with blockages. The city might purchase and provide the digesters, or they might offer significant financial incentivizes for purchasing and using them. However they do it, encouraging their use for high food waste facilities would be a big step in getting food waste out of the solid municipal waste stream. Eventually, once the use of the digesters is normalized and commonplace, they might be installed in neighborhoods for public use, though that would require ways to ensure that no non-organic material entered the digesters. Another good way to help that would be to incentive or mandate organic packaging for fast-food and to-go food packaging. So, sandwiches could be wrapped in paper that is 100% organic and compostable, as well as straws, clamshell containers, to-go bags, paper cups, and anything else that fast food or to-go orders could be packaged in. That way all of it could go into the pre-digesters and much of the sorting wouldn’t be necessary at all. Another benefit is that it would lower the overall amount of non-organic waste that would need sorted and dealt with.

Since food and other organic waste is by far the largest percentage of waste, the more focus that is put on it and the more of it that is removed from the overall waste stream, the easier the task of starting to sort and deal with the rest of the non-organic waste will be. As this part for organic waste is being implemented, the city could start developing and building the methods, infrastructure, and facilities to sort the remaining waste into different streams for processing. The organic waste would be slowly thinned out and the overall solid waste stream could be cut by a tenth, a quarter, a third, or even half. Getting those streams sorted would make large amounts of materials available for industries which might need them. Not only could the city could make an income from selling those sorted material streams, but it would also encourage the development of businesses and manufacturers to take advantage of those streams.

After I came up with this idea I found an article by the US Environmental Protection Agency where the writer was also espousing the idea of utilizing wastewater treatment plants to process and deal with the large amounts of food waste that a city generates.

I really like the idea, and I think the effect on a city could be enormous. If a city currently has 52% of their solid waste as food waste, imagine the reduction if they could get half of that food waste flowing to the wastewater treatment plant. That would remove a quarter of their solid waste stream, generate methane that can be used for energy generation, generate organic material that can be sold to farms in neighboring areas, and give them far cleaner water. With 25% less waste to deal with the waste management services would have a much easier time dealing with the solid waste of the city, and there would be far less trash and litter around the city. Once that starts to have an effect, and the rest of the solid waste starts to be sorted into separate streams for different metals, paper, plastics, etc, business and manufacturing in the city could be stimulated by those readily available materials.

I have been mostly talking about this idea for cities in Developing regions, but that doesn’t mean the idea is only for those regions. For developing regions this idea addresses multiple large issues at the same time. Vastly improving water quality, easing waste management by removing large percentages of waste, methane generation for sale or power generation, plus organic material to sell to farms which will improve agricultural output in the area. Cities in developed regions, on the other hand, are already likely to have decent waste management and water quality, and are possibly already capturing methane being produced by landfills. There is still a big advantage for them, however, as even in those developed regions, around 25% of waste going into landfills is still food and other organic waste. A city like that could remove up to a quarter of their solid waste, generate and capture more methane for power, and have more organic material to sell to farms in that region to boost agricultural productivity. There are still large benefits, but simply not as many as in a city in a developing regions. Also developed regions already have so much infrastructure in place, and so many set rigid existing processes that it may be difficult to motivate that kind of change without all of the obvious large benefits that a developing city would realize. If this were started in cities in Developing regions and the developed world saw the efficacy and benefits they might be willing to make the effort to implement it.

For the cities in Developing regions, this could really have a huge effect on the physical health of the people, as well as their mental health, their opinion of their city and home, the opinions of visitors to the city, and possibly even the opinions of potential investors for projects or companies in the city. The benefits and ramifications would be huge. This truly does start a move for the city towards circularity, as it gets much of that organic material out of the landfill and back into the agricultural cycles. This would be especially beneficial considering the relative shortages of phosphorus for fertilizer that agriculture could be facing in the near-term future. The fertilizer and phosphorus needs of the surrounding region could come largely from the organic material produced by the water treatment plants of the city.

I could see this being tried out in a city with a few hundred thousand people. Try out the parts, identify the challenges, and work on figuring out the difficulties. Next move up to a city with a million people and address the challenges of scaling it up. Then perhaps a city of five million people and repeat. If it can work on cities from a few hundred thousand to five million, then it could probably work on any city.

by Eric Sparks, 2025