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Urbanization: The Half-Time Score
Personal affluence up 3000%; people living in extreme poverty down from about 75% to 20%; atmospheric CO2 concentration up from 280 ppm to 393.5 ppm; at least 700 known species lost; 1.3 billion...
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What a Waste: Time to Pick It Up
Ask any city manager or mayor what their top priority is and you’re likely to get ‘solid waste’ as an answer. You would think in today’s age we would have solved the waste management challenge and...
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Cities Act as Talks Go On
Yesterday in downtown Rio, in Forte de Copacabana, there was an entirely different atmosphere than at the Rio+20 negotiations out in Rio’s suburbs. The public — some waiting as long as three hours —...
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What Katherine Boo’s book tells us about the modern city: garbage has more...
Review: Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo. Random House, 2012.Katherine Boo’s book, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” digs deep into life in a Mumbai undercity. The author escapes the...
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Peak Waste and Poverty – A Powerful Paradox
Urbanization is the most powerful force shaping the planet today. This can be good news as urbanization is the best bet we have to meet our global poverty reduction targets. Cities generate our wealth,...
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A landfill in every living room
Candida Brady, producer/director of “Trashed,” on communicating the need for clean-up Candida Brady thinks everyone should visit a landfill for a day. The producer/director of the 2012 documentary...
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What does waste management have to do with reducing crime and violence in...
Up until recently, if someone asked us what the most important benefits of solid waste management were, we would have said improving public health, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, or helping with...
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From garbage to music: Inspiring creative waste management
The young musicians in this orchestra from Paraguay built their instruments from recycled materials (photo courtesy of the U.S. Embassy in Paraguay used through a Creative Commons license.) I...
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From plastic to pavement: Another example of creative waste management
What if this “river” of plastic waste could be turned into a road to connect farmers to markets? (Photo: Farouk Mollah Banna/World Bank) You cannot imagine my surprise while reading a BusinessWeek...
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Five reasons cities should take a leading role on food waste
Photo: Boonchuay1970/Shutterstock Reported figures from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) on food loss and food waste highlight its importance to the global...
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Time to rethink how to harness the private sector to improve sustainable...
Photo credit: Gigira / Shutterstock. The post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are an ambitious set of targets that aim to support a comprehensive vision of sustainable development that...
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The power of data in driving sustainable development… Is solid waste the low...
The data revolution is upon us and the benefits, including improving the efficiency of corporations, spurring entrepreneurship, improving public services, improving coordination, and building...
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