Abstract:

In developing countries, informal waste management systems and informal waste pickers (IWP) are the most significant contributors to diverting waste from landfills. Waste management systems (WMS) are core to enabling the successful measurement, decision support, and allocation of resources to solve the challenges of waste globally, but in developing countries, the quality and volume of data to support these systems are lacking. This systematic literature review surfaces environmental concerns and poor waste data quality as one of the leading research topics on adopting WMS in the last five years. It also highlights that if our perspective on waste changes from a hazard to an artifact that provides data about post-consumer consumption, it becomes more valuable to the waste management industry. The informal waste management industry and IWP are well-positioned at the source of separation to provide and unlock the value of this data. The emergence of IoT and big data allows businesses to collect data about consumer waste at scale that was never feasible before. By seeing waste as a valuable data archive that can address the challenges of data quality and data availability in developing countries, waste data can prove valuable in driving WMS adoption and driving policy and budget decisions in the private and public sectors.