The road to 2030: cities and efficient environmental management

How can human settlements meet Sustainable Development Goal 11, Sustainable Cities and Communities? In the edition of the Future Trends Forum dedicated to Disruptive Cities, the Bankinter Innovation Foundation pointed to efficient resource management, waste management, smart water management and air quality control.

Waste and resource management: the Achilles’ heel of an urban civilization

Back in 2018, the Japanese region of Kamikatsu had been selected for SDGs Future Cities because of its impressive recycling rates of 80%—compared to a 20% national average—and its policy of widespread reduction of waste of all kinds.

But while Kamikatsu was achieving these enviable figures, the rest of the planet was suffering from a collapse of urban waste in landfills: China refused to become the planet’s garbage dump, and had stopped buying waste.

Why has Kamikatsu managed to live in the future while the rest of civilization sinks under the weight of its more recent past? According to European standards, the waste hierarchy requires classifying materials to prevent waste. This hierarchy follows a strict order that all cities should emulate:

1. Prevention: avoidance of use. Any material should be prevented from becoming waste, and that often means avoiding the use of that material, and with it its manufacture and associated raw material extraction. Avoid single-use items, for example, such as plastic bottles, and seek alternatives, such as steel or aluminum bottles in this case.
2. Reuse by design. In the event that a material, transformed into an object, is to be used in the face of a better alternative, it must be designed in such a way that it can be reused as many times as possible. The ideal example is the one-piece steel silverware. It is virtually eternal and generational.
3. End-of-life recycling. This object has limits of use after which its components must be separated in order to be reused in other items. Landfill must be avoided at all costs. If the object cannot be recycled, then it should not be manufactured.
4. Recovery for other purposes. Sometimes there is no choice but to make use of a good that is not recyclable. Even so, it can have a second life as a chipboard material that avoids the extraction of other raw materials.
5. Disposal: nothing can be done. There are raw materials that can only be eliminated chemically or by fire. It is the last resort, and a failure of the material recirculation system.

Although there are timid attempts to recirculate raw materials, the reality is that raw materials currently follow a linear course: they are extracted, often at an unacceptable environmental cost, processed and sent to where they will be used, usually for a short time, before being discarded for abandonment in a landfill.

Smart water management: how to avoid future conflicts, including sunken cities

Between 2020 and 2022 202 global conflicts over water, its control, extraction, and use were registered. The climate crisis, desertification or high-power climatic events magnify these conflicts.

Part of these conflicts are due to migration, which leads to an increase in groundwater extraction where there are poles of population attraction. Mexico o Jakarta are two examples of cities that are sinking due to their growing population depleting aquifers, but there are thousands of cities in this situation.

Some solutions to smart water management include: stop depleting aquifers, increase the vegetation mass that helps water to penetrate aquifers, creating rock dams and reforesting upstream of rivers to increase flow, recirculating recycled and treated water, and even taking it from the atmosphere.

Towards net zero mobility and climate

In the Innoverse podcast ‘Smart Mobility’, Raúl Rojas made the point of how the decarbonization of the vehicle fleet is going to be essential for cities to achieve their Sustainable Development Goals and targets. While regulations such as Low Emission Zones to get motor vehicles out of cities are clearly geared towards improving the quality of life and health of the local population, they also contribute to decarbonize human activities.

For this, the deployment of a dense network of car chargers—not necessarily high power, in fact, low power helps to extend the life of the batteries and avoids problems with electricity demand—will be a basic anchor point to stop polluting the air surrounding a city. Likewise, after vehicles, the next big urban pollutant is often combustion boilers, along with elements such as stoves on bar or restaurant terraces. Fortunately, it is becoming increasingly common to see a migration towards local emission-free electric machines. The next stop? Reducing consumption through efficient design.