The system boundary includes both public and private activities
in waste management, along with reuse and recycling of valuable
resources contained in the waste. This has become standard practice
over the last 30 years as solid waste management systems
have been modernised in high-income countries, although the
‘waste industry’, responsible inter alia for municipal recycling,
and the long established secondary materials industry are still in
many ways separate industrial sectors (Scheinberg, 2011). In addition,both are explicitly considered
here. Informal service providers working in the private waste service
sector are defined primarily in terms of their lack of a formal,
recognised status within the municipally-organised solid waste
management system – they can be and often are registered with
the authorities and pay taxes (Velis et al., 2012)
many city authorities in developing countries view their
waste management systems as quite distinct from the largely
informal recycling systems which exist alongside