 is the chief of the sustainable urban development section for the environment and development vision of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific. It works with governments to localize the sustainable development goals and promote sustainable solutions in cities throughout the Asia-Pacific regions. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you for the kind invitation. They are waiting before this session started. Who is going to go first? I think, actually I'm lost because it's going to be hard to follow the presentation very well. But what I'm going to do today is introduce you to a project and some initiatives that SCAP has been working on. They were looking specifically at plastics. But first I'm going to introduce what SCAP is. It's the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific. We are a regional development bar of the United Nations for headquarters in Bangkok. But we have four sub-regional offices, one in Delhi, one in L'Occitane-Stone, one in Incheon, and one in Fiji. We have 53 permanent members and nine associate members. We span the largest geographic area of all of our regional commissions in terms of the program. Much of our mandate is implementing global development agendas, the 2030 Agenda, the Paris Climate Agreement, the New York Agenda, and others. And we provide, through our platforms, policy dialogue, technical assistance, technical cooperation, capacity building to national and sub-national governments. And we facilitate this regional cooperation through the platform of SCAP. I mentioned the 2030 Agenda. I think most of you are familiar with the sustainable development goals. There are 17 different interrelated goals that really emphasize integrated solutions. When we talk about cities and the SDGs, we say that cities really are the locations where all of the SDGs intersect. And you can identify either actions for each of those SDGs that need to be implemented in cities, or you can start to categorize the way that cities operate on a daily basis. So while there is one SDG on sustainable cities, you can actually begin to disaggregate the way that cities operate and the way that they focus on infrastructure and the housing and basic services on the environment and resources to focus on resilience, equity and equality, partnerships, and start to categorize each of the SDGs according to the way that cities operate. And then in the three pillars of sustainable development, as previously mentioned, you can identify those interrelationships and start to foster integrated policies. I want to focus a little bit on the challenges of cities specifically in Asia, the Pacific region. It is one of the most rapidly urbanizing territories in the world. Half of the region's population is already urban that represents 60% of the global urban population. A lot of that population is located in vulnerable areas. Cities, as you know, generate 75, so that's 8%. Emissions accounting to each country, but also globally, they have disproportionate emission shares. Many of the cities in our region have meet urban planning or no urban planning. Many of them have relied for long periods of time on central government decisions. There hasn't been a devolution of authority down to a local level where the planning makes the most sense. And so they can't provide basic services for meet infrastructure needs. The population is growing faster than infrastructure improvements can be built. And there's a significant funding gap to address those infrastructure gaps. 19 of the top 20 most polluted cities in the world are Asia and it is on and on, wasting just one of the issues. Just one chart, you can see the disproportionate influence of Asian cities. This is the urban population of mid-year and the black line represents the Asian Pacific region and the projections going forward towards 2050 indicate that disproportionate level of development and population in Asian city cities will continue. That leads to also disproportionate share of material consumption throughout the region. So the purple lines on these graphs represent the Asian Pacific region. You can see that the growth from 1970 to 2010 far outweighs the growth in any of the other regions. You might think that this is actually happening in the largest cities, the mega cities in the region, but actually the predominance of what we call the unrecognized primacy is in the secondary cities. You can see again in Asia that cities of populations in less than 500,000 actually represent most of the population in this region. This is important because these are also the cities that traditionally have relied on intergovernmental transfers to make their approvance and to operate their local authorities. They've been the cities that don't have access to their own sources of revenue, primarily. They don't have access to financial capital. They don't have access to capital markets in any respect and they don't access international finance quite well. So the challenges of even addressing many of the issues that we've talked about in these cities is significant. So we wanted to focus on one particular challenge that is really again also the proportion in this region and that is the challenge of plastic waste. So we developed a project called Closing in the Loop and the idea was to look at plastic waste in the region. It's becoming a much more significant issue as some member states in the Asia Pacific, partly because it has also affected the marine economies. 8 million tons of plastic leaks into the oceans, more than 60% of plastic waste that leaks into the Pacific Ocean comes primarily from only five countries in this region. So this has a significant impact. Not just in the solid waste management policies, but these respective countries and cities that are also affecting the region and potentially the economies. The first step was really to understand materials. We think of plastic, but everybody knows there are lots of different types of plastic. They vary by market. So we need to understand what is in market and what is marketable. What are technical solutions for each of those different types of plastics and what are the solutions and what are the production alternatives? Is it possible to facilitate solutions that will reduce the impact of plastics? Following that, we looked at mapping of waste flows. So here you see kind of a flow chart of just plastic waste management in Bangkok. I'll come back to this, but the light-colored, kind of beige color is essentially informal actors. The greens are semi-formal and the grays are the formal actors. But we needed to understand who is doing what and where are the intersections between the informal and the formal sector. I'll come to Marley's focus on the informal sector shortly. But oftentimes we talk about here are the flows of waste. Here is the volume that cities and countries are dealing with, but that often doesn't take into account the large amount of volume that is already addressed and converted by the informal sector. So if we had that data, those numbers would actually be far more significant. And then looking at how do you quantify the value of that diversion and the savings to local authorities and in solid waste management processes. Despite any efforts, there are always plastic leakages and we need to know where that is happening as well, whether it's happening at the site of disposal, whether it's happening at transfer stations, or if it's happening simply because the product and the material itself has no further market value in the current system and how it changes. When I focus on the informal sector and informal workers, obviously in our particular region here, there is a large share of the labor force working in the informal sector. This is just for the waste sector, but it's generally in the informal sector. Almost as high as 90% is in the informal sector. It's not important to really engage with that with those stakeholders in the development of effective policies. If we are to come back to the implementing and achieving the SDGs, we can identify areas where the informal sector actually contributes significantly to the attainment of those targets. While more than 15 million people locally earn their income informally in the waste sector, it's not just the waste sector that has an impact from their work. It's almost every SDG that you can say, either plastic recycling that they're doing or silitating plastic recycling has impacts on decent work, no poverty, education, gender equality, and the list goes on and on. And in some cases, in some low income countries, it's important to note that waste pickers are responsible and accountable for collecting between half and all of waste and no cost municipalities. So we need to factor in again that value, educate and make aware of the government authorities on the value of that work. So the project really looked at generating evidence in these private cities. And then we looked at Pune, India, and Bangkok and tried to work with different stakeholders in those two locations. We worked at the Stockholm Environment Institute in the trade union in India and follow waste pickers in both locations and tried to again bring all of this different information together. Where are the flows? Where is the product? Who's doing what? Where are the intersection points? And it's those intersection points that aren't just areas where we can increase the volume of plastic that is produced, but it's where we can actually increase the economic impact for the informal workers. So understanding both the material flow and the social impacts is important. We looked at what are the different collecting stories, abstract recycling, and what are the challenges and the opportunities to improve the process. And actually a presentation this morning in the middle of a trumpet actually stole a lot of what it was going to say. So you can refer to it before and I will dwell on it. But it was important to look at these inclusive solutions and building the partnerships in order to increase the 3Rs and reduce the plastic leakage. So in Pune, they've had for a number of years now a cooperative and a waste connection mechanism where waste pickers collect from about 300 households per day. Individually they can collect between 10 and 15 kilos per person if they had a tricycle or a motorized price they can collect up to 50 kilos. It's interesting that the geographic distribution and the area that can be focused on really does relate not just to the informal and the formal but the transport systems upon which they rely. It's easy to say that in the formal system all there's a lot of possibilities of garbage trust that's actually not the way that cities work. It's not the way that communities or neighborhoods work. It's not the way that households generate their waste. So much more smaller scale systems are part of the reality of the far more effective, in many cases, than the formal system. And I would say if we're talking about the broader issue of urban resilience that the informal sector is often far more resilient than the formal sector because they don't rely on transportation systems or refrigeration or lots of technology. They adapt to the conditions and the circumstances that they face. And it's clear, obviously, when you're dealing with the informal sector that they collect and market what they can sell. So it was important to also characterize the types of different plastic. You see the greens represented in this table are those types of plastics that are easily marketable and there are failed prices established. The yellows are the more difficult ones and the reds don't yet have these kinds of opportunities. But I think this is an important point to stop because we focus on the cost and focus on the materials and we say that there needs to be investment in this and that and the burdens of picking up trash have all these costs. Really we need to focus also on investment where it's difficult to address materials or waste. So it's not to say that there's never going to be a solution for those in red or it's always going to be difficult for yellow. Sometimes the responsibility of a system or a local or national authorities is to invest in the innovations to address those challenges rather than continue to see those kinds of burdens. So understanding this waste characterization and what is marketable today could lead to different solutions in the future and that has both economic implications in terms of cost savings for the cities who have to pick up currently on recyclables and also has implications potentially for the informal who could access more and more markets as innovative solutions come to bear. So these are just some graphics that we've developed in the project for Pune. It was interesting to note some of the statistics. Roughly 90% of Pune's total municipal waste is collected and half of the waste is collected by the informal sector. And again, if you think simply about the costs of collecting some municipalities actually spend 40 to 60% of their municipal budgets on waste collection. So if you start to factor in some of these economic impacts across cities, it begins to add up very quickly. It also contributes to other national development strategies, whether it be climate change strategy or nationally determined contributions to the Paris Agreement that these things can start to be quantified and actually accelerate and increase to a much larger scale. So 50,000 tons of annual CO2 emissions simply because of what the informal sector is currently doing. The impact on the number of people including who are part of trade union and negotiate with the municipality and with the formal waste system to increase and try to increase market value of products is important. And then the way that these different stakeholders interact. So they're not just the large recycling facilities of the transportation, but they're small and medium scrap shops that are intermediate points in the flow of materials provided by the informal and they also are often not considered or accounted in the solid waste management data that is readily available by two cities or national governments. And then the transformation of those products into materials for new products or recycled into new products are also opportunities for stakeholders. Despite that there are still leakages, both from illegal dumping in proper storage and collected and again a lot of that is based simply on the inability to access particular markets. So we've developed a number of key actions that have been shared with the city. There are some that pay for them. In other presentations some about planning for policy bands some about establishing greater values for difficulty in recycling plastics some about fostering facilitating innovation and investing in industries that could develop further solutions. In Bangkok we looked at one of the three waste disposal stations and essentially mapped the same type of process. The numbers are a bit different but the overall impact is about the same. The informal sector is not as well organized as Pune is they don't have the trade union and in many of the countries in Southeast Asia and particularly there are more and more efforts to actually exclude the informal sector and impose regulations on who can collect waste. This is where some of the different interests between informal and formal whether it be incinerators whether it be energy providers whether it be the formal waste companies that run on contract. Many of them are pushing for more and more regulations to take out the impacts for discount to the informal sector. So this we also mapped here again and this is a slide that I showed earlier about the plastic waste in Bangkok and looking at the different stages. So the sources whether it's from residential institutional businesses where the current collection spots and it's interesting to see that there's what you typically expect in cities, municipal garbage collection crews but then there are interracial waste buyers and waste collectors all in the informal. So in many respects the number of informal stakeholders capways the number of formal stakeholders and that goes through the entire chain. So we've developed a regional policy guide to take some of the learnings from this project forward to cities and national governments and essentially there are different types of recommendations some on policy, some on better practices some on research and collection of more data partly to make aware the impact of the informal and potential cost savings to cities and to foster regional cooperation. We looked essentially at some broader categories including our production processes that could change could use different non-materials or bring in different recyclables into the more circular problem approach and the EPR that was mentioned in the previous segment various tax incentives, voluntary agreements and bans, fees tax incentives, reward schemes coupon schemes all of which have been discussed. So I would encourage you if you're interested to look at this regional policy guide this is a common website and it kind of synthesizes much of the work that's being done in the region to address.