Gender and Waste Nexus: Experiences from Bhutan, Mongolia and Nepal

PART 1

Gender, waste and climate change

Waste is an issue that concerns everyone worldwide. Generally understood as unwanted and discarded material that has lost value from its original form, waste includes gaseous, liquid and solid materials. Views of what constitutes waste are highly individual and vary from culture to culture. According to the GlobalWaste Management Outlook, the growing concern for proper waste management is linked to other global challenges, such as health, poverty, food security, resource management and climate change (United Nations Environment Programme [UNEP] 2015). Climate change impacts are intertwinedwith the problems of overproduction and overconsumption, and their resulting waste. This is both an existential and ecological crisis, especially given that production, consumption and waste are continuing to increase everywhere in the world. These trends are partly driven by urbanization, though the largest driver may be the effects of global circuits of capital on local economies. Since waste contributes to GHG emissions, efforts should be made to limit these through promoting more sustainable use of natural resources, as well as the prevention, reuse, recycling and recovery of waste. UNEP (2015) estimates that global GHG emissions could be reduced by 10–15 per cent if waste is properly managed using a life cycle approach (including recycling, turning waste into energy and landfill mitigation), which could potentially increase to 15–20 per cent with appropriate waste prevention. The long-term goal of mitigating the waste management sector’s climate change impacts requires a clear understanding of the broader local, regional and socioeconomic and political structures and conditions that establish the fundamentals of the industry and the functioning of the sector, as well as the gendered relationships throughout. Certain large-scale socioeconomic structures within each country, such as the distribution of education and literacy, economic sectors (e.g. consumption and production), political frameworks, urbanization and global trends, have specific and more general relevance to waste management in terms of gender. Areas to be addressed in the waste management sector therefore follow the waste management hierarchy, starting with the most preferable activities, such as waste prevention, through to the least preferable activities, such as unregulated landfill disposals and leakages into the environment

Gender and waste nexus

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