Our Trash Is Not Garbage. It’s a Resource We Keep Burying

Every day we throw things away without a second thought: a yogurt cup, potato peels, an old shirt. Multiply that by eight billion people and you get one of the quietest crises of our time.

The world produced about 2.1 billion tonnes of municipal waste in 2023, and the UN expects 3.8 billion tonnes by 2050. Counting pollution and health damage, managing it already costs about $361 billion a year. That bill could reach $640 billion by mid-century if nothing changes. [1]

Our region is not doing better. The Middle East and North Africa generate more than 155 million tons of waste a year, and that amount is expected to double by 2050. Less than 10% is recycled and more than two-thirds is mismanaged, at an environmental cost of about $7.2 billion a year. [2]

And Israel? The State Comptroller found that the average Israeli generated about 680 kg of waste a year, against an OECD average of 538 kg. He also warned that we are running out of landfill space. [3] Roughly 80% of our waste is simply buried. [4]

Food scraps make up about a third of our household waste. [5] When they rot in a landfill they release methane, a gas about 86 times more warming than carbon dioxide over 20 years. Waste causes about 20% of human-made methane. [6] We pay to bury energy, fertilizer and raw materials, and then we pay again for the pollution.

What we are doing about it

At Tel Aviv University I lead FutureWise. It is a consortium of engineers, chemists, environmental scientists, economists, planners and medical researchers from Tel Aviv University, Ariel University, Ben-Gurion University, Yezreel Valley College, Shenkar College and Meir Medical Center. [7] Our starting point: waste is a pile of resources in the wrong place.

• Waste to fuel. Using hot, pressurized water, we turn wet organic waste into a crude-like oil. It can be upgraded into fuel for trucks, ships and planes, and the process also leaves a charcoal-like solid.
• Waste to hydrogen, made from biogas and from treated wastewater.
• Waste to materials: biodegradable plastics, fertilizers, soil improvers, building materials from ash, and materials that capture heavy metals from water.
• Smart sorting: sensors combined with artificial intelligence that “look” at waste and send each stream to the right technology.
• The full picture: economists and planners test whether each solution pays off and where plants belong.

What is holding us back

Four barriers stand in the way.

Pilots and field demonstrations. Most of these technologies work at lab scale, measured in liters per hour. A city produces thousands of tons of waste a day. The step in between is a pilot plant fed with real municipal waste. It is expensive, and it is where most innovations die.

There is no single “waste.” Food scraps, plastics, sewage sludge, farm residues and construction debris each need a different technology. A process that works on clean food waste may fail on a mixed bag from a city bin.

AI needs data. Artificial intelligence can only sort what it has learned to recognize. Israel still lacks a detailed map of what our waste contains, where it comes from, and how it changes by season.

Regulation and “end-of-waste.” This is the critical bottleneck. Until the law recognizes a fuel or fertilizer made from waste as a product rather than waste, nobody can sell it. To write these end-of-waste criteria, regulators need data on emissions, safety and quality. But nobody has decided what size of pilot is big enough to produce data a regulator will accept. So researchers can’t raise money for a pilot without knowing it will count. Regulators can’t set rules without the data. And investors wait for both. The only way to break this circle is for regulators, municipalities, industry, investors and researchers to sit at one table and agree in advance on the scale and the data required.

Why it matters for the economy

The UN estimates that a fully circular approach could turn today’s cost into a net gain of about $108.5 billion a year worldwide by 2050. [1] The World Bank estimates that up to 83% of the waste collected in our region could be reused, recycled or turned into energy. [2] For Israel, every tonne turned into fuel, fertilizer or building material means less imported fuel, new jobs in the periphery, and less land given over to garbage.

Israel built a world-class water industry by treating wastewater as a resource. We can do the same with trash. The science is ready to leave the lab. What we need now is a clear path through regulation, the funding, and the courage to build the first real plants.

Sources

1. UNEP, Global Waste Management Outlook 2024: https://www.unep.org/resources/global-waste-management-outlook-2024 and press release: https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/world-must-move-beyond-waste-era-and-turn-rubbish-resource-un-report
2. World Bank, “Growing Waste Crisis in the Middle East and North Africa” (Jan 2026): https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2026/01/26/growing-waste-crisis-in-the-middle-east-and-north-africa-costs-us-7-2-billion-a-year-threatens-growth-and-tourism-new-wo
3. Ynet, State Comptroller report on landfill capacity (2022): https://www.ynetnews.com/environment/article/sj0hvqxs5
4. Times of Israel, Ministry of Environmental Protection waste strategy (2021): https://www.timesofisrael.com/ministry-releases-plan-to-bring-recycling-up-to-european-standards-by-2030/
5. Samuel Neaman Institute, “The waste management crisis – A national project”: https://www.neaman.org.il/en/the-waste-management-crisis-a-national-project/
6. Climate & Clean Air Coalition, Methane: https://www.ccacoalition.org/short-lived-climate-pollutants/methane
7. FutureWise consortium: https://futurewise.sites.tau.ac.il/