How Do They Manage Waste? – Performance of 5 Demonstration Municipalities of China IWM NAMA Assessed on the Basis of KPIs

Together with the project experts, the IWM NAMA team visited Xi’an, Lanzhou, Bengbu, Taian and Suzhou in September and October to complete the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) assessment.

The 2-day visits in each of the cities were packed with various activities, having onsite checks and discussions combined with meetings in city halls and knowledge exchanges. On average, the project team saw and checked 3-4 objects of cities’ waste management infrastructure per day including landfills, incineration plants, transfer stations, recycling centers, not to mention biological treatment plants for restaurant waste and decentralized small-scale composting plants in some municipalities. In addition, IWM NAMA had a chance to take a look at waste collection vehicles and experience the evolving realm of household waste segregation in communities piloting three- and four-bins systems, which proved to be highly innovative, harnessing the most recent advances in digital technologies.

Site visit at the incineration plant under construction in Xi’an

Waste segregation facility in Taian

Site visit at a recycling center in Lanzhou

Site visit at a recycling center in Lanzhou

The less entertaining, but equally important process of gathering the underlying data on waste management and overall cities’ socio-economic performance also took place. In particular, experts were interested in the amount of waste collected, recycled and treated under various treatment options; existence and level of environmental control and protection; inclusivity of waste management services from the point of view of both users and providers; cost of waste collection and treatment as well as the existing regulatory and political framework.

These key factors – also referred as Wasteaware ISWM (integrated sustainable waste management) benchmark indicators – were assessed by the project team and its experts in order to get a comprehensive picture on the current state of the municipal solid waste management in every demonstration municipality.
Based on the results of the KPIs assessment, the IWM NAMA is able to identify strengths of each city in providing waste management services, but more importantly detect weaknesses and gaps in the existing systems. This will help the team to come up with tailored sets of measures to accelerate the transition towards IWM and lower GHG emissions within the following phases of the project implementation.