What we can learn from four Global Cities’ Waste-Reducing Efforts

City with centralized waste bins for community use

By Sarah Currie-Halpern, Co-Founder and Partner

The 2020s are turning into a watershed decade already for eco-friendly efforts in urban centers. Various environmental policies once considered distant dreams have turned into real-world legislation under ambitious local governments. That’s great news for the residents of these eco-minded cities and, we might argue, for the rest of the world. Now no city can reasonably claim that it doesn’t know where to begin when it comes to climate policy, or that its specific needs are too difficult to make work with waste-reducing efforts.

In an era where climate pessimism tends to translate into climate inaction, several cities are leading the world in waste reduction, circular economy implementation, pollution reduction, and more. Here are four worth paying attention to:

Paris: Car-free streets transform a city

Paris’ ambitious car-free streets plan was met with a fair amount of suspicion when first proposed. That plan has since become a brilliant example of how a city can work without the noise, danger, and pollution of cars on its streets. Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s first initiative closed off roughly 100 streets in central Paris to cars, and it was so successful that voters approved another measure this spring to make an additional 500 streets car-free. The data seems to back up the newfound enjoyment of pedestrians, with particulate matter pollution and nitrogen dioxide pollution down by more than half since 2005.

Car-free streets in Paris

More difficult to measure but equally beneficial to human and environmental health is the reduction in airborne microplastics that car-free streets facilitate. Car tires are responsible for a quarter of microplastics released into the environment every year, with each tire shedding between six and eight pounds of microplastics over its lifetime. Fewer tires on Paris streets means fewer microplastics in Paris’ air and water—and in Parisian lungs.

Boston: Landfills as the new last resort

What started as a plastic bag ban has turned into one of the U.S.’s most impressive citywide zero-waste campaigns. Boston is currently aiming to increase its current landfill diversion rate from 25% to 80% by 2035—amounting to roughly 638,000 tons of waste kept out of the landfill and incinerators every year. To achieve this, city officials have started hosting free fix-it clinics, partnered with a deconstruction firm to create plans for contractors that avoid demolition, and installed textile collection and recovery bins throughout the city.  

If the number of local universities are any indication, Boston is a smart city. They’ve aced it with accessible public education too. Residents can type any item into Massachusetts’ digital “Recyclopedia” and get an answer to if and where it can be safely recycled. Zero waste pop-ups happen throughout the year for residents to get rid of hard-to-recycle items like chemicals and lightbulbs. With fall already underway, there’s even a yard waste pop-up in the autumn for leaves. 

Kiel: Multi-faceted thinking on zero waste

Kiel became Germany’s first zero-waste city in 2023 thanks to some seriously impressive and forward-thinking practices. It seems like anywhere Kiel could reduce waste, it did. It funded an organization to partner with salons and repurpose discarded hair into oil-absorbing sewage filters. It created a $200 grant for parents to switch from disposable diapers to cloth ones. It started a soil exchange to use excavated soil from construction sites on other road and building projects. It implemented a plan to phase out disposable packaging at local markets altogether.

Kiel’s hugely ambitious program encompasses some 107 individual measures, all of which are bolstered by a major public education and awareness arm. The city supports a local sustainability learning center and a multi-lingual digital hub of sustainable living resources. As it turns out, the easier you make it for people to identify and change their habits, the greener your city becomes. 

Bangkok: Compost for cash

Recycling and waste reduction efforts depend on excellent sorting from the get-go, and incentivizing people to do that on their own can be tricky. Bangkok took a tried-and-true approach to this, which is to say they put a little cash on the line. The city’s new scheme gives households discounted fees for separating waste. Households that separate their waste properly receive a discount of nearly 70% on combined collection and disposal fees, and can easily submit proof of that separation using an official app.

Bangkok traffic

Beyond residential measures, Bangkok has also taken on eliminating food waste generated by hundreds of markets throughout the city. Since incentivizing markets to separate and compost food scraps, city officials estimate that they kept 74,000 tons of garbage out of the landfill while saving $3.8 million in disposal costs in a single year. It’s even become a new source of fertilizer for public parks.

Cities are complex places, but many waste-reduction efforts are nothing if not versatile across different populations and urban climates. Seeing so many cities set ambitious goals and start taking actions to meet them should inject a little climate optimism into the discussion. It can be done—in fact, all over the world, we’re already doing it.