Understanding the challenges around waste management in Addis Ababa
Waste dumped in landfills generates greenhouse gases, pollutes the surroundings, and takes up space. Interventions need to examine how households can be motivated to segregate waste and how waste management agencies can process the waste better.
Addis Ababa generates 2,400-3,000 tons of municipal solid waste every day, of which 70% is organic and 15% recyclable (as revealed by members of Addis Ababa Cleaning and Management Agency). Households generate 76% of the city’s waste while 18% comes from institutions. Municipal waste becomes a priority for the city municipality as only 5% of organic waste is composted and another 5% is recycled and reused.
Household waste generation and collection
Primary waste collection is carried out by micro and small enterprises (MSEs). About 25% of waste generated is dumped illegally. In a discussion with members of Addis Ababa Cleaning and Management Agency, we found households pay 20% of their water bill for solid waste collection fee while businesses pay 42.5% of their water bill to the municipal authorities. Municipal authorities then pay the micro and small enterprises based on the quantity of waste collected by them.
Under this payment system, neither households nor waste MSEs are incentivised to ensure better waste collection. Households are not inclined to reduce their waste collection and instead have a perverse incentive to dump waste illegally and avoid the waste collection fee. MSEs do not have the incentive to ensure waste is segregated by households as it is more lucrative for them to collect all kinds of waste together because waste generation and the cost of waste management are not necessarily proportional to water consumption, and may create a mismatch between the funding source and the waste management expenditure. Further, there is no segregation at the source which can help boost the amount of waste getting composted.
Challenges to waste processing
Even when it comes to processing and disposal, there is a mismatch. The government provides a subsidy of ETB 3 per kg for compost. However, take up of this compost is low. In 2018, a Waste to Energy (WtE) plant, with a capacity of 1400 tons, was set up to process the city’s waste. The rest of the waste is dumped in the city’s landfill. However, since 70% of the city’s waste is organic and has low calorific value, the plant runs at only one-fourth of its capacity. On the other hand, if only recyclable waste which has high calorific value is segregated and sent to WtE, then given the waste composition of the city, recyclable waste generated in the city is not sufficient for the WtE to run at full capacity.
Objectives
Given the gaps and challenges above, the objectives of our study are:
- Evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of the current waste billing system to financially support a sustainable waste management system in Addis Ababa.
- Examine suitable ways to promote waste segregation at source among urban households.
- Explore how better household waste segregation could benefit the downstream waste treatment process.
Research design
We will design interventions from both the supply and demand side of waste segregation at source. On the demand side, we plan to implement household campaigns that aim to increase awareness and knowledge and to lower behavioural cost of waste segregation. In addition to the information campaign, we also aim to examine the effect of behavioural nudges such as providing cheap dustbins and periodical reminders to the households.
On the supply side, we will provide the households with a segregated collection service in which different wastes will be collected on different days. Working with the municipality and the local collectors, we can, for example, design a segregated collection service that still collect organics (and mixed waste for those who do not want to segregate) twice a week, but add one more day for inorganics.
Since dumping waste in a landfill only amounts to greenhouse gas emissions, contamination of soil and water, taking up of precious land in cities, waste processing is as important a next step as waste collection. Thus, it is important to process the waste collected. We will also collect information on barriers to the uptake of composting given that 70% of the city’s waste is organic.
Policy implications
Efficient management of municipal solid waste is essential in developing countries. A first step in this will be to design an economic instrument that incentivises households to reduce waste generation and implement segregation at source. The study will provide us with insights to design economic instruments and interventions to reduce waste generation and improve waste segregation at source.
The evaluation of the potential benefits of household waste segregation on the downstream waste treatment process will provide a special focus on the perspective of composting and waste-to-energy treatment. Information on segregated organic waste will also give us an insight into the supply of compost from cities and thus help in designing markets from composts and moving towards circularity. For waste-to-energy, we will evaluate the economic potential for waste-to-energy treatment under different scenarios using the information on the combustible inorganics and suitable organic content of the waste.