Sustainable Finance for Waste Management

For years now, climate change has been recognized as one of the major challenges of our society. Extreme weather situations and other climate change related events have increased in their frequency and severity affecting millions of people and causing enormous economic costs. In this scenario, some sectors of the economy, including waste management, play a key role to preserve the environment and, at the same time, to contribute to a sustainable development. While these changes are recognized as necessary, their implementations require considerable amount of money. Government support and existing specific tools (such as tax exemption, grants, and so on) are no longer sufficient to tackle the emergency coming from the climate change. Appropriate regulations and policy interventions have therefore increased their pressure on the ecosystem to promote sustainable investments and to redirect private sector financing towards projects combining environmental, social and economic considerations. In this chapter, we discuss barriers and enablers to the waste management financing as long as the existing financial tools to support waste management related initiative. A key role of the more recent policy initiatives emerges which leads to a discussion of the future perspectives of the waste management financing