Water and sanitation in the world’s cities 2010

This publication, Solid Waste Management in the World Cities, is the third edition in UN-HABITAT’s
State of Water and Sanitation in the World Cities series. It aims to capture the world’s current waste
management trends and draw attention to the importance of waste management, especially regarding
its role in reaching the UN Millennium Development Goals. The publication acknowledges the escalating challenges in solid waste management across the globe. It seeks to showcase the good work that is
being done on solid waste by cities around the world, large and small, rich and poor. It achieves this by
looking at what drives change in solid waste management, how cities find local solutions and what
seems to work best under different circumstances.

The publication endeavours to help decision-makers, practitioners and ordinary citizens understand how a solid waste management system works and to inspire people everywhere to make their own decisions on the next steps in developing a solution appropriate to their own city’s particular circumstances and needs. Most readers will never travel to all the 20 cities featured in this report, but through this publication they will have access to real experiences of people working on the ground. We hope it will provide a reference point for managing solid waste in the world’s cities and towns, and that many will follow in the footsteps of our authors, and we can move to an improved set of global reference data.

WASTE was a key contributor to this publication.