03 Jun 2022
Our Health & Social Impact Director, Ryngan Pyper, has once again collaborated with WHO on its new report: Assessing the health impacts of waste management in the context of the circular economy.
His latest report focuses on the public health implications of transitioning to a Circular Economy (CE) in the waste sector.
Published yesterday, the new report covers the use of Health Impact Assessment (HIA) as a tool to support strategic and project-level decisions about waste management policy and infrastructure. The report presents six HIA case studies and a literature review, which point to potential wins for the CE and population health.
Ryngan outlines below the top questions and takeaways from the report.
The Circular Economy (CE) is a concept of moving the use of resources from a linear model, of extract-use-discard, to a circular model, of reuse-recycle-recover. It reduces the use of new resources and minimises disposal. The waste management hierarchy is fundamental to CE delivery. In order of preference, it is: prevention of waste > re-use, recycle and energy recovery > disposal, if no other option.
Health Impact Assessment (HIA) is a process used to systematically judge the potential and sometimes unintended effects of proposals on the health of a population, and the distribution of those effects within the population.
There are win-win synergies between the CE and health. Population health risks are lower further up the waste management hierarchy, and accrues wider benefits.
Through a literature review and six international case studies, we found:
This marks Ryngan’s second co-authored WHO report in the space of three months, following Learning from practice: case studies of health in SEA and EIA across the WHO European Region, which launched in March.
Senuri Mahamithawa is also a fellow RPS author on the report.
Ryngan Pyper
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