title: Promoting Circular Economy in Cities of the Global South through Assessment of Waste Management Systems: The Case of Marrakech (Morocco)
Creators: name: Campitelli, Alessio
Publisher: name: UNSPECIFIED
Year: 2022

description: A functioning waste management system (WMS) is essential for a good quality of life, a clean environment and the conservation of natural resources. However, the WMS quality can vary widely from country to country. Many countries of the Global South do not have a functioning WMS. The reasons for this are manifold (e.g., lack of political will, lack of financial resources, poverty). In these countries, generated waste is mainly managed in a linear way, means discarded in open dumps or landfills or even openly burned. However, some countries are making efforts to promote a circular economy (CE) in their respective territories, which, in contrast to linear waste management, aims to close loops through recycling. The aim of this work is to develop a method to assess the CE status of urban WMSs, especially in the context of the Global South. This method should help to identify CE potentials in a structured manner by evaluating existing framework conditions and, based on this, deriving concrete recommendations for action. To achieve this, an assessment tool (WMS – development stage concept, WMS-DSC) was developed. It is based on five development stages with stage 1 representing a WMS with the absence of essential waste management (WM) elements and stage 5 exemplifying a functioning CE. Morocco, as a Global South country, has already launched strategies and programs in the past to bring their WM to a better standard and establish a basis for a CE. However, it is not clear whether current efforts will be sufficient to establish a CE in the future. With the aid of the WMS-DSC, this will be assessable. The WMS-DSC was tested and validated using the Moroccan city of Marrakech as an example. The results of the WMS-DSC analysis show that, depending on the system components, the development stages of Marrakech vary from stage 1 to stage 4, with stage 2 and stage 3 being dominant for the following components: governance, sector and market, and waste disposal. The least developed components are waste recycling and energy recovery. The results show that Marrakech is still far from establishing a functioning CE. However, the different categorizations show that certain components (e.g., governance and waste disposal) were promoted in the past by politics more than others (e.g., waste recycling). In addition, it becomes clear what additional work is needed for numerous system components (e.g., waste recycling, waste collection, and waste prevention). Based on these results, measures were derived in a subsequent step to promote a CE in Marrakech. All in all, 33 measures were identified and categorized into four clusters. These clusters comprise the increase of the collection rate and the separate collection of waste (cluster A), improve the control, regulation, monitoring and assessment of WMS (cluster B), promote the closing of the loop in Marrakech (cluster C) and encourage the cooperation between research, companies and society (cluster E). The holistic view of the WMS and the strong interconnection between the system and other system subcomponents and stakeholders (e.g., ministries, administration, companies, market) mean that not all measures are directly intended for the city of Marrakech, but some address higher levels (e.g., national and regional) as well as the company level. The results from this work can be directly integrated into WM related action plans, master plans or WM plans at the municipal level as well as at higher levels. In conclusion, the case study validated the WMS-DSC and demonstrated its added value for WMS analysis in cities of the Global South by assessing the various facets of Marrakech's WMS, identifying areas for improvement, and deriving specific recommendations for action.