What a Waste 2.0: A Global Snapshot of Solid Waste Management to 2050

By Silpa Kaza, L. Yao, Perinaz Bhada-Tata, F. Woerden. 2018

By 2050, the world is expected to generate 3.40 billion tons of waste annually, increasing drastically from today’s 2.01 billion tons. What a Waste 2.0: A Global Snapshot of Solid Waste Management to 2050 aggregates extensive solid waste data at the national and urban levels. It estimates and projects waste generation to 2030 and 2050. Beyond the core data metrics from waste generation to disposal, the report provides information on waste management costs, revenues, and tariffs; special wastes; regulations; public communication; administrative and operational models; and the informal sector.

Subfields: AI Ethics, Fairness & Society, Social Sciences & Humanities

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Citations in the corpus

ZeroWaste Dataset: Towards Deformable Object Segmentation in Cluttered Scenes (2021, background): “As the world population grows and becomes increasingly urbanized, waste production is estimated to reach 2.6 billion tonnes a year in 2030, an increase from its current level of around 2.1 billion tonnes [28].”
Predicted growth in plastic waste exceeds efforts to mitigate plastic pollution (2020, methodology): “Global scale data for plastic waste generation, collection, and disposal are often lacking or unreliable because of inconsistencies in reporting among countries, differences in methodologies and units used in reporting, and omitted values (2, 18).”
The quest for seafloor macrolitter: a critical review of background knowledge, current methods and future prospects (2020, background): “Yet, global annual waste generation is projected to jump from 2.0 billion tons in 2016 to ca. 3.4 billion tons over the next 30 years, with plastics accounting for ∼ 12% ( ≈ 242 Mt) of this refuse (Kaza et al 2018).”
Greenhouse gas emissions from food systems: building the evidence base (2021, unknown): “We first estimated the mass of solid food waste disposed to landfills by country, by applying food waste data from the IPCC guidelines (2019) to solid waste destination data from the World Bank (Kaza et al 2018).”
Technologies and policies to decarbonize global industry: Review and assessment of mitigation drivers through 2070 (2020, background): “recycling, EPR fees may be used to support R&D programs and waste prevention outreach activities [313].”
Evaluating scenarios toward zero plastic pollution (2020, methodology): “We calculated projected growth in demand for plastic using country-level population size (29), per capita macroplastic MSW (30, 31), and microplastic-generating product use and loss rates.”
A comprehensive review on the mechanical properties of waste tire rubber concrete (2020, unknown): “As per the 2018 world bank report ‘‘What a Waste 2.0: A Global Snapshot of Solid Waste Management to 2050” [1] global annual waste generation is expected to grow by 70 percent to 3.4 billion tonnes over the next 30 years, up from 2.01 billion tonnes in 2016.”
Artificial intelligence for waste management in smart cities: a review (2023, background): “Unfortunately, 33% of solid waste is managed correctly and disposed of in illegal dumpsites or unmonitored landfills (Kaza et al. 2018).”
The world’s growing municipal solid waste: trends and impacts (2020, methodology): “What a Waste (Kaza et al 2018) provides shares of composition and treatment of total MSW but does not specify which type is treated how.”
On the Competition between Two Modes of Product Recovery: Remanufacturing and Refurbishing (2019, background): “The World Bank estimated that 2.01 billion tonnes of municipal solid waste was generated in 2016 and predicted that this number would grow to 3.40 billion tonnes by 2050 (World Bank Report 2016).”
Technologies and perspectives for achieving carbon neutrality (2021, background): “4 billion tons.(215) Despite having only 16% of the world’s population, high-income countries produce 34% of the world’s waste.”