HUMANITARIAN WASTE MANAGEMENT IN EMERGENCY AND MEDIUM-TERM OPERATIONS

In humanitarian contexts, local infrastructures and environmental policies are often too weak to handle wastes produced by NGOs. As a result, humanitarian organizations must find solutions to ensure that the wastes they produces – including biomedical, chemical, automotive and electronic wastes regarded as hazardous by the Basel Convention – are handled responsibly.

Humanitarian interventions, as well as natural disasters and conflicts, produce large quantity of wastes including hazardous wastes. To ensure they abide by both international conventions and the humanitarian principle of “do no harm” NGOs must take ownership of the problem by finding adapted solutions to collect, store and dispose these wastes.