The annual leadership meeting of the United Nations General Assembly concluded in New York last week.
The annual leadership meeting of the United Nations General Assembly concluded in New York last week. The Secretary General of the UN had aimed to make Climate Change the focal point of the deliberations. While there was modest movement on carbon mitigation efforts, and in some cases even a retreat from prior pledges by countries like the United Kingdom, there was quiet success on another neglected environmental issue. Waste management is in many ways the primordial environmental issue for humanity. Climate change is a manifestation of what may happen to global systems if we are not careful about managing waste flows.
Earlier this year, the UN Secretary General initiated a new “board of eminent persons” on “Zero Waste.” I have the good fortune of being a member of this board and at UNGA we had an opportunity to have the first informal meeting of the members hosted by the Turkish Mission to the United Nations. The Executive Directors of the United Nations Environment Programme and the UN Habitat (the agency working on sustainable cities) as well as Mayor of New York Eric Adams were in attendance.
While physical laws suggest that we will always have some “waste” in either material or the energy generated in any process, such ostensible waste could potentially be used by someone else or for other purposes. “Zero waste” refers to minimizing as much waste as possible through a systems-level redesign of production and consumption mechanisms.
