Fortschritte im Recycling und Abfallmanagement

Eight Years to Go to Meet the SDG Targets: How Can Waste Management Enable and be Enabled?

Abstract

Venkatesh G

Waste management has evolved from the earlier five step hierarchy to include many more R’s: Reclaim, Repurpose, Remediate, Renovate, Replenish, Revere nature, being a few of them. Waste management can play a key role in the alleviation of, and the simultaneous adaptation to the repercussions of climate change. Waste valorisation, which is gradually entrenching itself, in both principle and practice, can go a long way in directly and indirectly enabling humankind to get closer to several SDG targets, and perhaps also overachieve in some respects. Value creation by adopting the R’s wherever, however, whenever and by whosoever possible, is a sine qua non for achieving the SDGs by year 2030, and continuing in the same vein thereafter, when the world will have to grapple more perceptibly with the repercussions of climate change. It is clear that we cannot avert climate change now. We can, at best, alleviate the intensity of its repercussions, though unfortunately not uniformly all over the world. This commentary paper posits waste management in the scheme of things related to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as both enabler and enabled. The exposition introduces readers to the multi dimensionality of sustainable development, and thereby of efficient, value generating waste management.