What’s in the bin? Cities' waste data can guide smarter decisions

In many fast-growing cities across Africa and Asia, solid waste management is both one of the most visible public services and one of the least understood. Trucks collect refuse, informal pickers recover what value they can, and limited landfill space fills rapidly. 

Yet despite spending as much as 20% of their municipal budgets on waste services, many city governments still lack a clear picture of what is actually in the waste stream they are paying to collect and dispose of. Without this knowledge, they risk taking decisions on technology, pricing, and partnerships with little evidence to guide them.

The World Bank’s What A Waste Global Database, a mapped city-level dataset, begins to change that. Drawing on data compiled across developing cities in Africa and South Asia, it profiles the composition of municipal waste – the shares of organics, plastics, paper, metals, wood and more – for dozens of individual cities. 

An interactive map below allows users to explore these profiles city by city. In conjunction with this dataset, insights from our synthesis paper on urban solid waste management offer a practical evidence base for mayors and city planners to make better choices about investments and technology adoption.

Why the composition of waste streams matters

Developing countries face three intertwined challenges in managing urban waste systems: storage, collection, and diversion. 

• Storage: If 60-70% of a city’s waste is food and green matter, households and markets need secure containers to prevent odour, pests and disease. They also need to collect frequently.
• Collection: Knowing the bulk density and recyclability of waste can help design collection routes and fee structures.
• Diversion: If the material mix is known, cities can divert high-value recyclables to formal or informal recovery, or channel organics to composting rather than landfills.

Data on the composition of waste is therefore not a technocratic detail; it is the foundation for choosing appropriate technologies. Cities with high organic content in their waste can consider composting or anaerobic digestion. Cities with significant amounts of plastic, metal, and glass waste need robust separation and recycling systems. 

Cities with largely inert, low-value mixed waste should focus on engineered landfills and leachate control to prevent liquid drainage. Without an understanding of the waste stream, infrastructure choices become a matter of guesswork.

How can waste data bridge policy and practice?

There is a stark tension between policy aspiration and practical delivery. Many municipalities have ambitious master plans and policy documents promising higher recycling rates, circular economy initiatives and modern transfer stations. Yet, as our work notes, implementation often falters because plans are not grounded in real data. 

Contracts are awarded without clear performance benchmarks; “integrated waste management” strategies fail to match local conditions; and informal workers – who already recover a significant portion of the recyclable stream – are sidelined rather than supported.

City-level composition data can bridge this gap. By revealing what is in the waste stream, it allows officials to:

• Set realistic targets for diversion and recycling based on actual materials available
• Procure technologies suited to the local mix, avoiding expensive plants that run below capacity
• Justify support for informal workers by quantifying the value of materials they already recover
• Design tariffs and fees that reflect service costs and encourage separation at source

For example, the dataset shows that Chittagong, in Bangladesh, has a waste stream dominated by food and organic material, suggesting that investments in decentralised composting could have a high impact. In contrast, in Rwanda, Kigali’s higher fraction of plastics and paper points to the need for improved separation and recycling partnerships.

The International Growth Centre has supported such work – for example, a project on managing solid waste for a sustainable Accra traced the city’s waste flows and identified where collection systems break down. Similarly, a study assessing waste management services in Kigali measured service provision and associated costs. 

This kind of research is invaluable, but is still only a snapshot – often based on one-off surveys or single-city analyses. The What A Waste dataset complements and extends such work by offering comparable composition data across dozens of cities and multiple countries.

Seeing differences across cities can support targeted responses 

Most waste statistics in developing countries are reported at the national level. These averages obscure the fact that two cities in the same country can have very different waste streams due to differences in income levels, climate, industrial base and consumer habits. 

This new interactive map above brings this variation to life. Users can hover over a city to see a small bar chart showing the shares of organics, plastics, metals and other materials – a snapshot of the “hidden flows” behind the visible piles of refuse.

These differences matter, and until now have mostly been documented piecemeal. A donor considering support for a composting plant in Ethiopia can use this map to see which municipalities have a sufficiently high share of organics to make such an investment viable. 

A mayor in Uganda deciding whether to invest in a materials recovery facility can benchmark their city’s recyclable fraction against that of their peers. 

Researchers and NGOs can identify where informal recyclers are most active and where interventions could improve their working conditions. Bringing these disparate data points together in one place allows for more systematic learning and better targeting of support.

Despite institutional challenges, having evidence can encourage action

Data alone will not solve the political and institutional challenges discussed in our forthcoming paper. Even with composition data in hand, city leaders still face entrenched interests, fragmented responsibilities, and limited financing.

Integrating informal workers can meet resistance from unions or private contractors, while changing tariff structures to encourage separation can be politically sensitive. Similarly, investing in new technology requires not just capital but also long-term operational capacity.

Nevertheless, having evidence at hand makes it harder to ignore these choices or hide behind slogans. Knowing the true composition of a city’s waste stream sharpens the trade-offs between options. 

It allows mayors to explain to citizens why a particular technology or fee structure is chosen, and to donors why a project is bankable. It also provides a baseline for monitoring whether reforms actually deliver cleaner streets, higher recovery rates and lower greenhouse gas emissions.

A call to explore urban waste

Urban solid waste management is not glamorous, but it is a cornerstone of healthy, liveable and productive cities. As urban populations swell, the economic, environmental, and health costs of mismanaged waste will only rise. 

Moving from aspiration to implementation requires not just policies and plans, but also the kind of granular, city-level evidence now available through this dataset and interactive map. Policymakers, donors and researchers can use it to compare cities, identify feasible technologies, and benchmark progress. 

As more cities contribute their composition data, the picture of urban waste will become clearer – creating a shared evidence base for cleaner, more sustainable urban growth.

Throughout UN-Habitat's Urban October, IGC will be showcasing some of the solutions for sustainable growth in cities. Read the Cities that Work flagship synthesis paper on policy options for improved solid waste management.

Find out more about Cities that Work