Market Waste Streams

Like many of the rapidly urbanizing cities across the African continent, Blantyre, Malawi struggles to manage it’s solid waste. Over 365,000 tonnes of solid waste per year are generated in the country’s four major cities (Lilongwe, Blantyre, Zomba and Mzuzu) of which, about 280,000 tonnes remain uncollected. Despite widespread poverty (GDP is about $400), rising incomes and access to cheap, imported goods means that plastic consumption and trash generation has risen sharply; indeed, plastic generation in low-​income countries is expected to triple by 2050.

In Blantyre, solid waste management is the responsibility of the Blantyre City Council. Operating only one or two compactor vehicles, BCC collects trash mainly richer, so-​called “formal” areas, while “skips” (also called dumpsters in other countries) have been installed to service poorer, “informal” areas as well as in strategic places such as markets and hospitals. Currently, BCC manages about 50 skips with a single (more on this later) truck that is capable of lifting, dumping, and discharging the 7m3 container.

When waste is collected, it is dumped at the Mzedi dumpsite: the only (non-​engineered) landfill serving Blantyre, despite the fact that it reached the end of its service life 20 years ago. As organics are the primary waste type in most low-​income countries, one way to extend the lifespan of the dumpsite, while reducing GHG emissions, is to divert degradable materials to separate facilities for processing and/or value generation.

Seeking to divert landfilled waste and promote organic nutrient use, The NGO Waste Enterprises, set up a large-​scale composting facility to process the organic market waste from the nearby Limbe Market: the biggest produce market in Blantyre. However, and despite the majority of the waste being organic, the skip is used for all types of trash. As a result, a non-​trivial amount of time is spent separating the waste fractions; the cost of this work significantly impacts the sustainability of the operation.

The goal of this work therefore is to investigate ways of incentiving market workers and/or vendors to separate organic from inorganic waste fractions at public markets to ensure a clean feedstock for compost production.

We are currently testing four different incentive packages to determine if we could sufficiently incentivize already-​employed market employees to separate, and keep-​separated, organic waste such that the cost of the program could be offset by the labour savings required to separate the mixed waste later on. Could we pay a little to save a lot in the end?