Evaluation of Indicators’ Potential to Assess Circularity in Waste Management : A case study on Nairobi’s municipal solid waste management system

Sammanfattning

As the circular economy model gained significant traction in numerous cities as part of their sustainability efforts, increasing urbanisation and solid waste generation in African cities prompted the integration of its principles into the waste management (WM) policies in many of these countries. Indicator-based frameworks are considered valuable tools for measuring circular economy progress. However, monitoring and evaluation efforts in the African region are limited, as standard indicators used in European countries are often unavailable, and existing tools are not well-suited to the African context. Kenya exemplifies these shortcomings, where systematic data collection and indicators related to waste and circular economy are notably absent. Given that current research reveals a gap in their availability in the African region, this study explored the potential of currently available indicators to measure and assess circularity in waste management, focusing on Nairobi’s municipal solid waste management system as a case study. In this context, the study aimed to understand how indicator-based assessments can be utilized to monitor and evaluate circularity performance at the city level. Thus, 29 papers with 633 indicators were assessed against a set of defined criteria related to circular economy principles. The assessment result, along with insights from stakeholder interviews, guided the selection of 121 indicators relevant to the system under study. These selected indicators were then categorized following the 10R framework to highlight which circular economy principles were reflected. The findings revealed that the assessed papers covered many topics, but none fulfilled all assessment criteria. Furthermore, the study highlighted an uneven distribution of the assessed indicators across the four pillars of sustainable development, with the majority connecting to the environmental pillar. Similarly, most assessed indicators reflected only the principles of Refuse, Rethink, Reduce, Re-use, Recycle, and Recover, with none associated with the remaining four Rs. While there is potential in the currently available indicators to assess circularity in Nairobi’s municipal solid waste management systems, further work is still needed. The findings of this study can support future research on the relationship between CE and WM in the development of more comprehensive, context-specific indicators to measure circularity in WM systems.