Executive Summary

This Key Note report analyses the global waste management market and mainly focuses on the generation of municipal waste. Key Note estimates that, in 2004, the total amount of municipal waste generated will be 1.84 billion tonnes, an increase of around 7% on 2003.

The global market for waste management is sustained by the municipal waste output of the world's wealthiest nations, although it is also being fuelled by developing countries as they become wealthier and adopt many of the characteristics of well-developed countries.

Waste is generated from many waste streams, notably manufacturing, construction/demolition, mining, quarrying and municipal waste. However, this report focuses on municipal waste because of its widespread significance in terms of generation, collection and disposal. In general, industrial waste streams produce more waste (in terms of tonnage) than municipal waste, although they affect relatively small and specific sectors of society. In contrast, municipal waste relates to almost the entire world's population.

Waste management is a vital issue, particularly in relation to the environment. In addition to the pollution of the ground and water courses, gaseous emissions from waste disposal routes contribute to global warming. The costs associated with waste disposal can also be significant, particularly in densely-populated countries.

This report discusses waste management options in terms of the waste hierarchy, which prioritises options in descending order of preference. The hierarchy consists of waste elimination/disposal through waste reduction at source (which is the preferred method), reuse, recycling, composting, energy recovery, land spreading, landfill and incineration without energy recovery. In addition, major waste treatment technologies - including recycling/reprocessing, landfill (which includes gas recovery), incineration using combined heat and power (CHP) plants for energy recovery, pyrolysis (to produce fuels) and composting - are covered. Waste disposal routes vary according to region and developed countries are beginning to increase their use of recycling. In densely-populated countries, landfill is being discouraged through the introduction of financial penalties, although for some countries, incineration is widely used as a means of reducing the amount of waste sent to landfill. Incineration often gives rise to significant opposition from local and environmental lobby groups that are concerned with the health and safety issues relating to stack emissions from incinerators. In a number of the world's less-developed economies, open dumping with little or no treatment or control is widely practised.

The report provides a compilation of waste statistics for a wide range of countries. In the waste management market, available data are often old, incomplete and lack harmony in terms of definition. Although efforts are being made in more-developed economies to produce up-to-date data, for the majority of the world's population waste data are very poorly reported.

However, in this report, Key Note presents a broad global coverage of available information to provide an overall view of municipal data by tonnage, generation per capita per annum (p.a.) and disposal route. For some industrialised countries, Key Note's analysis provides statistics on other waste streams in addition to municipal data.

Waste management policy, legislation and market structure are discussed for the EU, Eastern Europe, the US, Asia Pacific, Africa and South America. Although legislation of various types is a widely accepted method of controlling waste generation and disposal methods, there might not be adequate resources to implement the legislation in certain regions and there is a trade, some of it illegal, in transporting waste from one country to another for disposal. Traditionally, municipalities have been responsible for municipal waste collection and disposal although, increasingly, commercial companies are being used for waste management tasks. In some countries, commercial companies work with municipal organisations, whereas in others, municipalities themselves have formed companies for waste management work. In order to provide an insight into the commercial sector, profiles of selected major waste management companies are provided.

In order to investigate the global waste management market in terms of size, Key Note has developed a model for compiling an estimate of the amount of municipal waste produced globally, which is based on a study of population, gross domestic product (GDP), GDP per capita and an estimate of waste produced in kilograms (kg) per capita p.a. In order to analyse the data, the world market is divided into three groups: high-income countries, medium-income countries and low-income countries.

Key Note estimates that, between 2004 and 2008, global generation of municipal waste will rise by 31.1%. In the future, trends in global waste management depend on each major country and its state of development. In the EU, there is a wide range of legislation and programmes that are designed to dispose of waste in a more environmentally acceptable manner. Eastern European countries, especially those that are preparing to join the EU, are falling in line with the goals of EU policy. The US also has legislation and targets for waste management. For the majority of countries, waste generation continues to grow and even in developed economies where comprehensive strategies have been developed, the amount of waste generated rises with GDP. The regions facing the greatest waste management challenge are developing economies that have high GDP growth rates and industrial facilities that now produce a number of the world's goods.