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
There is a quiet violence in a spreadsheet that never changes. For years, waste planning in Pakistan’s cities has run on static accounting, a single annual figure that treats a living, seasonal, deeply uneven system as if it were a fixed quantity poured once into a bin. The study of Islamabad and Rawalpindi by Akram and colleagues matters because it refuses that convenience. By building a Dynamic Material Flow Analysis of the twin cities, layering it with Monte Carlo simulation and Sankey visualization, the authors insist on the one thing waste governance in the developing world most often lacks: a willingness to watch the system move
over time.
The numbers they surface are not comforting, and they should not be. Municipal waste is climbing by roughly eight to twelve percent a year, while collection efficiency stalls
somewhere between sixty-four and seventy-one percent. The gap between those two trends is the whole crisis in miniature, a system whose intake accelerates while its throughput idles. Into that gap falls an estimated seven percent lost to leakage, burning, and improper disposal, and a forecasting uncertainty of nine to fourteen percent that most planning documents would simply pretend away. The achievement here is not the precision of any single figure; it is the
honesty of admitting the range.
The model’s most useful move is to name the flows that static accounting erases. Trade flow captures the recyclables that cross administrative boundaries, much of it through informal hands. Loss flow forces planners to confront the material that vanishes from the ledger between household and landfill. Segregation flow separates wet, dry, and recyclable streams and, in doing so, exposes how little of the waste stream is actually being routed toward recovery. These are not
academic abstractions. They are the categories a municipality would need to budget against if it were serious about circularity rather than merely rhetorical about it.
That said, the paper’s candor about its own limits is where its credibility lives, and where the next argument begins. The waste was never categorized at source, so composition had to be estimated. The seven percent loss figure is an assumption, not a measurement. And the informal sector, the ragpickers, itinerant buyers, and small traders who in practice recover much of what the formal system misses, sits largely outside the model’s boundary. In most South Asian cities the informal economy is the recycling economy, and any future iteration that keeps those actors outside the frame will keep mistaking their invisibility for their absence. To the authors’ credit, the trade flow is a first structural attempt to let them back in.
What deserves emphasis is how little this approach demands. It runs on a two-year municipal dataset, freely available modeling tools, and cooperation between two existing authorities, the CDA and the RWMC. It is not a plea for imported sensors or expensive infrastructure; it is a replicable, low-resource template that a mid-sized city could actually operate. Coupled eventually with life-cycle assessment, economic valuation, and genuine institutional data-sharing, it points toward planning that is evidence-led rather than evidence-starved.
The deeper lesson is almost philosophical. A city cannot manage what it will not measure, and it will not measure what it would rather not see. This work’s real contribution is methodological courage, the decision to model time, loss, and uncertainty precisely because they are inconvenient. If the circular economy is ever to arrive in urban Pakistan, it will not begin with machinery. It will begin with the willingness to write down what the ledger has been quietly leaving out.
