Pakam's Digital Revolution As Blueprint For Edo's Environmental Renaissance

Since its 2015 Expo, Milan has continued to foster a number of unique initiatives to combat food waste, promote healthy and sustainable food systems, and ensure that its people never go hungry. Through projects such as collecting unsold food at the end of market day for distribution in soup kitchens, using apps to redirect food waste, implementing new laws to ease the process of food donation, as well as fostering collaboration between cities, Milan is leading the efforts to prioritize food on the New Urban Agenda.

The government wants more farmers turning waste methane into biogas to help combat the negative effects of global climate change. California is leading the initiative, largely through a cap-and-trade program.

Ambikapur, India, created a decentralized waste management system that allowed it to become a zero-landfill community while creating local jobs and earning revenue. Waste is collected from households, sorted into recyclable categories and compost, and then purchased by companies that will use it to create new goods.

Restaurants, grocers, and cafes can put together surprise bags of surplus food that would have otherwise been thrown out and sell it for a third of the original cost to users on the Too Good to Go app. The app was designed to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that accompany food waste while giving businesses a way to recoup losses and consumers a less expensive way to access good food.

Across the world, countries are reckoning with its astounding single-use plastic bag waste by instituting legislation that taxes or all-out bans them. Research has shown that taxing the bags has been a more effective strategy with less unintended consequences, as banning often leads to a sharp increase in thicker plastics or paper bags. In places that have instituted the tax, they’ve seen a 40 percent decrease in usage, and arguably more importantly, a cultural shift away from single-use plastics.

Families living in the wetlands of Lake Victoria in Kisumu, Kenya are working together with a nonprofit called Ecofinder Kenya to protect and conserve the wetlands they live on. The crux of the incentive centers around the Eocfinder toilet, which converts human and animal waste to biogas, but they also work with solar lamps, water pumps, and a "farmer-to-farmer" program in which farmers share environmentally-friendly expertise. The program has been going on for 3 years now, and the wetlands have since seen a return of wildlife and growth, particularly with fish and birds.

Technology can help reduce food waste. Olio and Winnow are two examples. Olio is an app that allows people to easily exchange extra or unwanted food for free. Winnow is a smart trash can that calculates the cost of waste in commercial kitchens, inspiring chefs to be more creative to save both food and money.

With climate change an ever-increasing threat, one city in Denmark is helping to inspire hope through the successful implementation of a self-sustaining treatment plant that provides fresh water to the local community using only energy produced from the waste and sewage it filters. Other cities are now looking to replicate the model.

Solar power is an important renewable energy in Germany, but when the sun is out, it can overpower the grid. Likewise, when the sun is not out, the reception of solar power decreases. Germany has piloted battery installations that store solar energy for use when the sunlight is not plentiful and has successfully incentivized citizens to use them to lower costs.

Garbage is an ever-mounting issue in cities around the world, as emerging economies adopt the single-use consumerism habits of the West and disposal of solid waste material becomes increasingly problematic. The city of Taipei has implemented some clever ways to help encourage citizens to reduce their trash generation - including unusual "singing garbage trucks" and making garbage disposal a more publicly visible process - while increasing incentives to compost and recycle.