Is there a financing void for sustainable waste management solutions?

IMMEDIATE ACTION, CORPORATE TRANSPARENCY AND INSTITUTIONAL FINANCING is needed to scale solutions in the waste crisis, not small personal steps of corporate employees.

Bangladesh is drowning in waste. Corporates, Government and Financial Institutions have not just failed the people of Bangladesh, they are standing on solid shoreground holding lifesavers watching us drown - telling us to change behaviours and learn how to swim otherwise they can't provide the lifesaver. We conducted grassroots action research to prove it.?

During the environmental campaign of ‘Plastic Free July’ there were multiple LinkedIn posts by corporate employees - from consumer goods companies to polymer manufacturers and retailers - about the ‘reflections’ they are taking having gone to some of the waste dump sites in Bangladesh. Rather than focus on direct action they could implement as a person with decision making power and KPI bonus incentives around plastic waste issues - such posts mentioned the need to take ‘small personal steps’, rather than use their position of influence to drive implementation at scale. But of course this is just social media - what then is the reality?

Bangladesh's population is over 164 million, the city of Chattogram has over 8 million people - roughly the same as New York City.?We interviewed over 270 stakeholders in the plastic waste value chain, from households to retailers and mudir dokan shops, municipal waste collectors, start-ups, plastic sorting centres, and waste pickers. These are our findings:

Our Waste Management Systems are Destroyed

Recycling value chains are an important part of the solution to create the necessary market drivers in the waste management sector. However, financing such infrastructure to strengthen weak value chains is not the same as solving for completely decimated systems. Recycling is not a value chain in Chattogram, it is a poverty chain - driving exploitative labour in Bangladesh and creating pull factors for unethical business. We don’t have a financing gap, we have a financing void - which continues to be ignored as evident in the 90 page World Bank National Action Plan for Sustainable Plastic Management in Bangladesh only referring to the following financing requirements to deliver solutions:

• Public and private sectors ‘allocating budgets’
• Creation of an anti-litter budget plan
• Government incentives for manufacturers to promote biodegradable alternatives
• Subsidised markets built on Extended Producer Responsibility regulation (which is still only proposed discussions and therefore unlikely to be robustly implemented in the next 5 years considering the implementation challenges of the single-use plastic bans).?

As of July 2022, a Chattogram waste picker could sell the discarded HDPE (high density polyethylene) and LDPE (light density polyethylene) international branded shampoo bottles to the counterfeit market at US$0.27 (25Tk) per bottle. The pricing offered by the same international brands for collecting waste plastic sachets was US $0.021 (2TK) per kilogram.? Sachets are the primary packaging types for shampoo products purchased from mudir dokan consumers, representing up to 80% of beauty product sales.

The economics clearly do not add up. Collection 1 kg of plastic bottles yields a substantially greater profit for any waste collector - in both formal and informal collection chains, taking up far less space than collecting 1 kg of sachets, primarily composed of PP (polypropylene) multi layer. This is a textbook market failure, the consequence of which results in mass dumping by seaside yards and open burning of plastic waste - releasing toxic gases such as dioxins and heavy metals into the air my community is breathing.

Corporates claiming they are acting responsibly means being accountable or having a duty to act - it is the very definition of being ‘responsible’.? Of the 40 retailers interviewed, none had been engaged by brand distributors on plastic waste or sustainability issues. Municipality waste workers provided multiple examples of brand representatives tracking this pricing disparity for years - yet have not sought to implement action in the community surrounding their factories where much of this illicit trade is occurring.

Lack of policy enforcement is well known in Bangladesh. Despite 20 years of a single use plastic bag ban, the use of extra polybag packaging remains widespread by all retailers interviewed. Focusing solely on policy does not solve for the absence of implementation, it creates a screen for corporations to hide behind and blame.?

The Broken Reality

The aforementioned World Bank National Action Plan states a 50% recycling rate can be achieved by 2025, meaning 3 years from today - through the financing measures listed above. Based on our grassroots market research and impact modelling this would require over US$800 million to be invested in the Chattogram waste management sector, deployed within the next 12 months in order to reach such an impact target. This makes the lack of tangible commitment or measurable action from either the public or private sector even more devastating. We simply are not going to get there.?

Women and children will remain trapped working in the garbage dumps for US$1.06 - $2.12 (100-200 Tk) per day, primarily collecting bottle materials that are being bought by counterfeit operators while the mass consumption sachets continue to leak to waterways and openly burnt to our air. The abuse of “Dandy” - a polyethene ‘gum’? that is provided to child waste workers to inhale in order to suppress hunger - will continue to escalate. Businesses will continue to profit from avoiding their responsibilities to ensure child-labour free supply chains while claiming meeting recycling targets.?

Incremental steps by consumers, employees of corporate brand owners, development institutions and government aren’t going to progress this issue. Drastic system change and accountability by both private and public sector actors are critical. But our generation is on our own, and our society expects us to find and build our own solutions - learn to swim while we are drowning in the waste of corporate excess and greed.??

Action drives impact. We are looking for additional funding partners and collaborators to take our action research to the next level and generate activities and interventions at scale. Contact me to find out more.?

世界银行 Plastic Free July 联合国儿童基金会 International Labour Organization Alliance to End Plastic Waste