ZIMBABWE’S waste crisis is often framed as a failure of discipline, funding or enforcement, yet these explanations miss a more uncomfortable truth: the country’s waste problem persists because it is governed as a sanitation issue rather than an economic system.
Laws exist, responsibilities are defined, and penalties are prescribed, but waste continues to pile up in urban centres, pollute waterways and strain public health systems.
The problem is not regulatory absence; it is regulatory misalignment with economic reality.
Current regulations largely assign waste management to local authorities, require environmental protection standards and criminalise illegal dumping.
In theory, this should work.
In practice, municipalities are expected to collect, transport and dispose of waste without the financial base, infrastructure or market linkages to do so effectively.
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Waste is treated as a cost to be minimised, not a resource to be managed, traded and transformed.
As long as this logic remains unchanged, inefficiency is inevitable.
What is missing is a deliberate system that moves waste from households and industries into productive use.
At present, waste has no structured economic pathway.
Informal waste collectors recover recyclable materials, yet they operate in isolation, exposed to health risks and excluded from finance, skills development and stable markets.
Private firms interested in recycling or waste-to-energy struggle with irregular supply, high processing costs and uncertain returns.
The result is a broken chain in which waste is generated, partially recovered and then abandoned to landfills or illegal dumps.
The solution lies not in adding more rules, but in redesigning how waste flows through the economy.
One practical intervention is the creation of municipal-private aggregation hubs that treat waste as feedstock rather than refuse.
These facilities would sit between collection and final disposal, enabling sorting, weighing, pricing and routing of waste into specific uses such as recycling, composting or energy generation.
Instead of municipalities carrying the full burden of waste disposal, they would become facilitators of value chains, earning revenue while stabilising supply for downstream processors.
Informal waste collectors are central to this model.
Rather than being marginalised or periodically “cleaned out” of urban spaces, they should be formally integrated into recovery systems through co-operatives or service contracts linked to aggregation hubs.
With basic equipment, safety protections and guaranteed buyers, recovery rates would rise sharply while livelihoods improve.
This approach is more realistic than attempting to replace informal systems with capital-intensive municipal operations that rarely survive budget cycles.
Another missing piece is demand.
Recycling struggles not because materials are unavailable, but because markets for recycled outputs are weak.
Without predictable buyers, recovery remains fragile.
Public procurement can play a decisive role here.
Requirements for recycled content in construction materials, road works or packaging would immediately create demand for secondary materials.
Industrial incentives that favour firms using locally recovered inputs would further anchor recycling within the productive economy.
Waste becomes valuable when someone is required, or encouraged, to buy what it produces.
Waste-to-energy is often discussed as a solution, but its success depends on scale and design.
Large centralised plants require consistent feedstock and heavy capital investment, conditions that are difficult to meet.
Smaller, decentralised facilities linked to markets, agro-processing zones or high-density suburbs are more viable.
These systems reduce transport costs, stabilise supply and generate energy where it is needed most.
Their feasibility depends less on policy statements and more on predictable licensing, standardised tariffs and technical support that lowers investment risk.
Household behaviour also matters, but moral appeals and awareness campaigns have delivered limited results.
People change behaviour when incentives change.
Deposit-return schemes for plastics and glass, pay-for-volume systems in high-income areas, and community-level rewards for waste reduction introduce economic feedback where enforcement capacity is weak.
These tools shift responsibility without relying on constant policing.
Ultimately, Zimbabwe’s waste problem is a design failure.
Regulation focuses on control, disposal and punishment, while value creation is left to chance.
A circular economy cannot emerge from fragmented responsibility and unfunded mandates.
It requires co-ordination, market signals and institutions that treat waste as an input into production rather than an inconvenience to be buried.
Zimbabwe does not need to reinvent its laws.
It needs to make them work within a system that rewards recovery, reuse and enterprise.
Turning waste into wealth is not an environmental slogan; it is an economic strategy.
Until waste management is designed as such, cities will remain dirty, opportunities will remain lost, and a growing pool of potential value will continue to be thrown away.