Business and employment opportunities in waste management and recycling in Asia

摘要

Quantifying global waste generation has been a mammoth task, given the unreliability of the data, particularly for developing countries that face other important development imperatives. One estimate puts municipal solid waste generation worldwide in 2006 at 2 billion tones (Chalmin and Gaillochet, 2009). The world population in 2006 was around 6.5 billion, resulting in waste generation of approximately 0.85 kg/cap/d. Taking into account a working hypothesis of 0.95 kg/cap/d, allowing for an increase due to economic growth over the last 4 years and the present Asian population of 4 billion, Asia alone would have generated 1.3 billion tonnes of waste in 2010. The problems represented by these amounts of waste needs no further comment.