News from the President

Dear friends, colleagues and ISWA members,

Let's Remove 5 Million Cars from the Roads!

I wrote this piece in Mexico City, in between the breaks of the C40 biennial Mayors Summit, where I was invited to open the session on “Cities in the Circular Economy: New Models for Managing Materials and Driving Green Growth”. C40 is probably the most powerful and emblematic initiative that drives climate change solutions in cities. It connects more than 80 of the world’s greatest cities, representing over 600 million people and 25% of the global economy.

C40 presented its new report Deadline 2020 (the report can be found at www.c40.org/researches/deadline-2020), a very interesting roadmap for the contribution of cities towards the implementation of the Paris Accord on climate change. The key-message is simple and powerful. Climate change is the biggest challenge ever faced by humanity. But humanity is more capable than ever to face it, as long as it understands the urgency and acts according specific, very tight deadlines. C40 cities must undertake an unprecedented increase in the pace and scale of climate action, doing 125% more than they have in the last decade by 2020.

The alarm rings louder and louder: the next 4 years will determine whether or not the world’s megacities can deliver their part of the ambition of the Paris Agreement. Without action by cities, the Paris Agreement will not be delivered. A dramatic “bending of the curve” is required now to ensure that in the coming decades the necessary reductions remain feasible, given that actions can take many years to mature and reach full scale.

I was really happy to see that waste management is considered one of the 5 key paths towards substantial reduction of GHGs. I felt enthusiasm when the mayors of Copenhagen, Sydney and Beijing described how important it is to move towards advanced recycling and recovery systems in order to achieve the Paris Accord targets. The most important aspect is that waste management improvements and the shift towards the circular economy are considered one of the most “low hanging fruits”, comparing to other activities (like changing the buildings CO2 footprint) that require decades to be prepared and implemented. ISWA must certainly be proud of its contribution: after several years and a lot of efforts, waste management starts to be recognized as a key-contributor for the reduction of GHGs in the short to medium term.

This is where ISWA’s campaign for closing the world’s biggest dumpsites perfectly fits (by the way you can sign the declaration right now at this link) - we need each and everyone’s help to collect thousands of supporters, please push this cause in every possible channel, including your social media too). Besides the substantial health and environmental benefits for 65 million people, just closing the 50 biggest dumpsites (and substituting them with a sanitary landfill with biogas recovery) will result in climate benefits in the order of 20-22 million CO2eq annually! According to the USA EPA GHGs calculator, this is equal to removing 5 million cars from the USA roads!

Closing the world’s biggest dumpsites is a very difficult challenge. But, the world is more capable than ever to do it. Let’s start by picking battles small enough to win, but big enough to matter...

Antonis Mavropoulos
President ISWA