About Author
Ebraheem Akram
Environmental Expert
Originating from northern Pakistan, Ebraheem Akram is an environmental specialist whose work is grounded in a strong dedication to sustainability and societal development. Beyond his research in climate change and climate policy, he is a dedicated mentor with years of experience guiding students, driven by a commitment to expanding educational access and analytical literacy. An avid mechanical enthusiast and restorer, he applies the same precision and patience to his personal pursuits as he does to complex environmental systems. Ebraheem’s personal and professional endeavors remain anchored in a unified purpose: combining scientific rigor with community engagement to support long-term environmental stewardship.
ARTICLE
Every conversation about the circular economy in developing countries eventually collides with the same wall: we cannot manage what we cannot measure, and we cannot measure what we refuse to track over time. The study of solid waste flows across Islamabad and Rawalpindi is valuable less for the specific numbers it produces than for the argument it makes about how we should be counting in the first place.
For decades, waste planning in cities like these has leaned on static material flow analysis, a single snapshot that treats a year of garbage as though it arrived all at once, in predictable proportions, from a city that never changes. It is a convenient fiction. Real waste systems breathe. Generation spikes with festivals, seasons, and consumption cycles, while collection capacity stays stubbornly flat. By replacing the static snapshot with a dynamic model built in STAN and visualized through Sankey diagrams, the authors do something quietly radical for a resource-constrained context: they let the data move.
What emerges is a more honest and more uncomfortable picture. The finding that waste generation is markedly more volatile than collection is not a technical footnote; it is the whole problem stated in one line. A system whose intake fluctuates while its throughput does not is a system that leaks and leak it does. The introduction of three explicit flows, trade, loss, and segregation, is the paper’s most useful contribution, because it names the parts of the system that static accounting quietly erases. The unaccounted “loss flow,” even at an assumed seven percent, forces planners to confront the material that simply disappears from the ledger between the household and the landfill.
Then there is the sobering headline that only a fifth of the waste stream holds real recycling potential. It would be easy to read this as a ceiling on ambition. It is better read as a mandate for precision. If circularity in urban Pakistan will be built on a narrow recoverable fraction, then every ton in that fraction matters, and the case for segregation at source, rather than heroic sorting at the dump, becomes overwhelming.
The limitations are real and the authors are right to state them plainly. Categorized data is scarce, the loss estimate is an assumption rather than a measurement, and the informal sector, the ragpickers and small traders who in practice recover much of what the formal system misses, sits outside the model entirely. That last omission is the most consequential, because in most South Asian cities the informal economy is the recycling economy. Any future version of this work that fails to bring those actors inside the boundary will keep mistaking invisibility for absence.
Still, the ambition here is calibrated correctly. This is not a call for expensive sensors or imported infrastructure. It is a replicable, low-resource framework that a mid-sized municipality could actually run. Coupled eventually with life-cycle assessment, economic valuation, and genuine government-run cooperation between authorities like the CDA and RWMC, it points toward waste management that is data-driven rather than data-starved. The path to a circular economy in urban Pakistan does not begin with more machinery. It begins with the willingness to watch the system change over time, and to write down what we would rather not see.
