IB Geography 3.2.3 the Disposal and Recycling of Consumer Items Notes

Disposal and Recycling Sit at the Bottom of a Five-Step Priority Order

The Waste Hierarchy Ranks Five Options in a Fixed Priority Order

1. The clearest legal statement of the hierarchy is Article 4 of the EU Waste Framework Directive, Directive 2008/98/EC, which sets a five-step priority order binding on member states.
2. Prevention comes first, because waste that is never generated needs no collection, no treatment and no site.
3. Preparing for re-use comes second, covering checking, cleaning and repairing so that an item can be used again without further processing.
4. Recycling comes third, meaning reprocessing waste materials into products, materials or substances, whether for the original purpose or another one.
5. Other recovery, of which energy recovery is the example the directive itself names, comes fourth.
6. Disposal comes last, defined by exclusion as any operation that is not recovery.

Municipal Solid Waste Is About a Tenth of What an Economy Throws Away

1. The World Bank's What a Waste 3.0 projects municipal solid waste rising from 2.56 billion tonnes in 2022 to 3.86 billion by 2050, about 50 percent.
2. UNEP projects 2.1 billion tonnes in 2023 and 3.8 billion in 2050 because its dataset and definitions differ from the World Bank's.
3. The gap comes from coverage and definition rather than from arithmetic, because the two exercises draw on different country submissions and neither agency publishes a reconciliation of the other's total.
4. Eurostat, extracting data in September 2024, records 2,233 million tonnes of waste generated in the EU in 2022 by all economic activities and households together, or 4,991 kilograms per capita.
5. Within that total, construction produced 38.4 percent, mining and quarrying 22.7 percent, waste and water services 10.5 percent, manufacturing 10.4 percent, and households only 8.9 percent.
6. EU municipal waste generation was 517 kilograms per person in 2024, about 232 million tonnes, roughly a tenth of the 2,233 million tonnes generated across all economic activities two years earlier.

Generation Rises With Income, Though the Rate and the Total Move Differently

1. What a Waste 3.0 puts the global average at 0.88 kilograms of municipal waste per person per day in 2022.
2. Low-income countries sit at 0.2 kilograms per person per day or less, with Niger given as an example, while high-income countries reach 2.2 kilograms or more, with the United States and Canada given as examples.
3. That is a spread of more than tenfold in the rate, so income tracks per capita generation closely once purchasing power reaches the point where goods are replaced rather than repaired.
4. Composition shifts as well, with the World Bank reporting food waste at 38 percent of all municipal waste globally, a share that is higher where packaged and processed goods make up less of the basket.
5. Within the EU, generation ranged in 2024 from 305 kilograms per capita in Romania to 782 in Austria, which shows that income is not the only variable even inside one regulatory bloc.

The Human Cost of Waste Sits in the Third That Is Uncollected or Openly Dumped

1. What a Waste 3.0 reports that one third of all waste produced globally goes uncollected or is openly dumped, which is the single most consequential statistic in this topic.
2. Collection reaches only 31 percent of the waste generated in Sub-Saharan Africa and 67 percent in South Asia, so in some regions the service that rich-country students take for granted covers a minority of the stream.
3. In low-income countries only about 3 percent of the waste generated is treated in any way, meaning recycled, composted or incinerated, so nearly the whole stream goes to landfill, open dumps or open burning.
4. Open dumping exposes groundwater to leachate and lets methane escape, while open burning releases particulates and dioxins directly into the air people are breathing at the site.
5. The World Bank counts about 18 million people working in urban waste management worldwide, of whom roughly 40 percent operate outside formal employment.

National Recycling Rates Are Built on Boundaries That Countries Draw Differently

1. Collected for recycling, sent for reprocessing and actually reprocessed are three different quantities, any of which can be published as the recycling rate.
2. EU law now fixes the boundary, because Article 11a(2) of Directive 2008/98/EC requires the weight of municipal waste recycled to be measured when the waste enters the recycling operation.
3. Article 11a allows exported waste to count towards a member state's target only where the exporting state can show treatment took place in conditions broadly equivalent to Union law.
4. Eurostat itself warns that its voluntary Joint Questionnaire and the legally binding reporting obligations apply different calculation rules and can therefore produce different results for the same country and year.
5. Eurostat reports that the EU recycled 48 percent of municipal waste in 2024, below targets of 55 percent in 2025, 60 percent in 2030 and 65 percent in 2035.
6. The US EPA's latest national dataset covers 2018: 292.4 million tons of municipal solid waste, with 32.1 percent recycled or composted, 11.8 percent burned for energy and 50 percent landfilled.

Wales Shows What a High Rate Looks Like and What It Still Leaves Behind

1. Welsh local-authority waste data for 2024-25 report a 68.4 percent reuse, recycling and composting rate, up from 66.6 percent a year earlier.
2. That is short of the 70 percent target for 2024 to 2025 set in the Beyond Recycling strategy of 2021, so a high performer can still miss its own benchmark.
3. Wales generated 1.42 million tonnes of local authority municipal waste over the year, the third lowest figure recorded since 2001 to 2002, so the rate rose while the total fell.
4. The share sent to landfill fell to 0.7 percent in 2024 to 2025 from 42.0 percent in 2012 to 2013, which is a genuine transformation of the disposal end.
5. 30.0 percent now goes to incineration with energy recovery, up from 4.7 percent over the same period, a fraction that sits on the recovery rung rather than the recycling rung of the hierarchy.

The Waste Trade Has Run from Higher-Income Exporters to Lower-Income Importers

1. Brooks, Wang and Jambeck found that high-income OECD countries sent 70 percent of exported plastic waste to lower-income East Asian and Pacific countries in 2016.
2. The same paper found that China alone had imported a cumulative 45 percent of all traded plastic waste since 1992, which made one country the pivot of the whole system.
3. The mechanism runs through cost rather than malice, because container ships returning empty from consumer markets to manufacturing regions make backhaul freight cheap.
4. Importers wanted the material as secondary raw material for manufacturing, so the flow was a trade in feedstock and not simply an act of dumping.
5. The direction of the flow follows the gap in reprocessing cost, which reflects wages, energy prices and the strictness with which emission and labour standards are enforced.

China's Import Restrictions From January 2018 Redirected the Whole System

1. The United States International Trade Commission, in an executive briefing of April 2018, records that China notified the World Trade Organization of its restrictions in July 2017 and brought them into force on 1 January 2018.
2. China's July 2017 notification listed 24 prohibited waste types, while the USITC counted 27 and reported a 0.5 percent contamination limit for recovered paper from March 2018.
3. A 0.5 percent limit is the binding constraint rather than the category list, because kerbside systems that collect recyclables mixed in one bin cannot easily sort down to that purity.
4. Brooks, Wang and Jambeck estimated that 111 million tonnes of plastic waste would be displaced by the Chinese policy by 2030, which is a projection of accumulated displacement rather than an annual figure.
5. Waste shifted towards South and South East Asia; by October 2017, India had overtaken China as the leading destination for US mixed-paper exports.
6. Eurostat's news release of 24 April 2025 shows where the European flow settled, with 35.7 million tonnes of recyclable raw materials exported in 2024, down 8.2 percent on 2023.

Four Legal Milestones Now Govern Where Waste Is Allowed to Move

1. The Basel Convention controls transboundary movements of hazardous and other wastes through prior informed consent, under which the importing state and every transit state must agree in writing before a shipment leaves.
2. The Basel Convention's Ban Amendment took effect on 5 December 2019 and prohibits EU and OECD members, plus Liechtenstein, from exporting hazardous waste to other states.
3. The plastic waste amendments were adopted at COP-14 in 2019 and became effective on 1 January 2021, adding entry Y48 to Annex II, entry A3210 to Annex VIII and entry B3011 to Annex IX.
4. The practical effect is that mixed and contaminated plastic waste now needs prior informed consent, while clean single-polymer streams destined for environmentally sound recycling do not.

1. The e-waste amendments were adopted at COP-15 in June 2022 and took effect on 1 January 2025, adding Y49 to Annex II and A1181 to Annex VIII while deleting entries B1110 and B4030 from Annex IX.
2. From that date all electrical and electronic waste is subject to prior informed consent, which closes the route by which non-hazardous e-waste could previously move without consent.
3. The European Union went further in Regulation (EU) 2024/1157, in force from 20 May 2024, which prohibits exports of plastic waste to non-OECD countries from 21 November 2026.

E-Waste Grows Faster than Its Recycling and Holds the Densest Recoverable Value

1. The Global E-waste Monitor 2024, published by the ITU and UNITAR in March 2024 and reporting the year 2022, records 62 million tonnes of e-waste generated in 2022, up 82 percent on 2010.
2. Generation is rising by about 2.6 million tonnes a year and is projected to reach 82 million tonnes in 2030.
3. Only 22.3 percent, or 13.8 million tonnes, was documented as formally collected and recycled in 2022, a share the Monitor projects will fall to 20 percent by 2030.
4. The share falls even though collection tonnage rises, because generation is growing faster than collection capacity, which is a ratio effect rather than a collapse in effort.
5. The Monitor values the metals embedded in 2022 e-waste at 91 billion United States dollars, of which 28 billion was reclaimed as secondary raw materials, leaving 62 billion dollars of recoverable resources unaccounted for.
6. Europe documented a 42.8 percent e-waste collection and recycling rate, compared with under 1 percent in Africa; countries with e-waste laws average about 25 percent.
7. Europe generated 17.6 kilograms per person in 2022 but documented collection of only 7.5 kilograms per person, so the two per capita figures answer different questions and must not be swapped.

Formal and Informal Routes Capture Different Metals at Different Human Cost

1. A formal recovery route shreds and sorts mechanically, then sends concentrate to an integrated smelter that can recover a long list of metals under permitted emission controls.
2. An informal route recovers what can be freed by hand and by fire, so copper is stripped from cable by burning off the insulation and gold is leached from boards with acid in the open air.
3. The informal route is efficient at capturing the two or three most valuable metals and loses almost everything else, which is why higher recovery rates and lower human cost usually move together.

1. WHO estimates that up to 12.9 million women and more than 18 million children and adolescents work in informal industries that include waste processing.
2. The same report links exposure at e-waste sites to adverse birth outcomes, changes in lung function, DNA damage and impaired thyroid function.

Rwanda Shows That the Binding Constraint Is Collection Rather Than Capacity

1. Enviroserve Rwanda Green Park runs an e-waste dismantling and recycling facility in Rwanda under a public private partnership with the government.
2. Trade for Development News, published by the Enhanced Integrated Framework on 6 July 2020, reports that the facility supports more than 400 jobs.
3. The operator reported collecting 3,000 tonnes of e-waste in 2019, which it described as about 30 percent of the facility's capacity.
4. A plant running at under a third of capacity in 2019, in a country that was already generating e-waste, points to collection and household hand-in as the binding constraint rather than processing technology.

Plastics Are Where the Stock Question and the Flow Question Get Swapped

1. Global plastics production reached about 431 million tonnes in 2024; Europe's share fell from 22 percent in 2006 to 12 percent.
2. That is an annual production flow, distinct both from the cumulative stock and from the annual flow of plastic waste that follows.
3. Geyer, Jambeck and Law, writing in Science Advances in 2017, estimated that 8,300 million tonnes of virgin plastics had been produced in total up to 2015, a stock.
4. Of the 6,300 million tonnes of plastic waste generated up to 2015, they estimated that about 9 percent had been recycled, 12 percent incinerated and 79 percent accumulated in landfills or the natural environment.
5. The same authors projected roughly 12,000 million tonnes of plastic waste in landfills or the natural environment by 2050 if production and waste management trends continued.
6. The OECD estimated that only 9 percent of plastic waste was recycled in 2019, when global plastic waste was double its level two decades earlier.
7. The World Bank's What a Waste 3.0 reports that nearly 29 percent of all plastic waste, about 93 million tonnes a year, is mismanaged, meaning it is neither recycled nor contained in a controlled facility.

Estimates of How Much Plastic Reaches the Water Disagree by an Order of Magnitude

1. Borrelle and colleagues, writing in Science in 2020, estimated that 19 to 23 million tonnes, or 11 percent of the plastic waste generated globally in 2016, entered aquatic ecosystems.
2. Meijer and colleagues estimated that rivers carried 0.8 to 2.7 million tonnes of plastic to the ocean each year, with over 1,000 rivers producing 80 percent.
3. Those two ranges do not overlap, because they measure different quantities rather than because one of them is wrong.
4. Borrelle and colleagues count entry into all aquatic ecosystems by every pathway, including lakes, wetlands and direct coastal dumping, while Meijer and colleagues count only what rivers deliver to the ocean.
5. Both are modelled from mismanaged waste estimates and calibrated against limited field observation, which is why the uncertainty is wide and why new field campaigns keep moving the numbers.

Siting a Disposal Site Follows the Distribution of Power

1. Dumps and landfills are sited where land is cheap, where the ground is already degraded and where organized objection is weakest, so the siting decision maps onto existing inequality.
2. Proximity to a site is exposure, meaning physical position relative to leachate, smoke and vermin, which on its own does not determine harm.
3. Vulnerability is added by housing quality, occupation, nutrition, access to health care and whether a household has the means to move, which is why two people at the same distance can face very different risk.
4. Settlements grow towards dumps rather than the reverse in many cities, because the site is a source of income for waste pickers, so the population is drawn by the livelihood and then exposed by it.
5. Enforcement against informal recovery therefore removes an income before it removes a hazard, which is the pattern the Agbogbloshie demolition of July 2021 followed.
6. At the international scale the same asymmetry appears as consent capacity, because prior informed consent gives every state a right of refusal while only some have the customs laboratories to exercise it.

Reading Waste Data Off a Flow Diagram or a Ranked Table

1. A Sankey diagram of waste destinations encodes tonnage as band width, so the eye compares areas and the caption must be checked for whether the bands are shares or absolute tonnes.
2. A ranked table of exporters sorts on total tonnage and therefore on economy size, so add a per capita column before drawing any conclusion about behaviour.
3. A choropleth of recycling rates shades a ratio whose numerator and denominator differ between countries, so it invites comparisons the data cannot support.