<p>Household waste management in Conakry, Guinea’s capital city suffers under a poorly organized, underfunded collection and processing protocol. Unlike other utility services such as water and electricity, municipal waste management is decentralized and lacks infrastructural and administrative capacity. There is no clear federal government oversight, but rather partial regulation by different departments. Each of the city’s five constituent municipalities manages waste management from its total operating budget, depending on how it sees fit. As a result, public, private, and informal actors all play a role in waste management, but without coordination. Privately contracted waste collectors pick up garbage from households and transport it to collection points via carts. Informal waste pickers salvage the most valuable materials to sell. Publicly operated garbage trucks haul trash, often sporadically, from collection points to overflowing landfills. Municipalities lack the funds to fuel trucks, capacity to run enough trucks or to run them at the right times of day to avoid heavy traffic and locations for appropriate waste collection. The city’s central landfill is well above capacity. Working with the support of UNDP, a 2019 Columbia University Masters of Sustainability Management capstone advised by Prof. Lynnette Widder developed new models for waste collection and value creation based upon the following insights: • Collection and transportation are stymied by high fuel costs, equipment failure, traffic congestion, uncoordinated municipal oversight, and other variables. • There are markets for recyclables like metals and plastics, but salvaged material would be much more valuable when sorted at the source. Increasing sorting relies on incentivizing resident behavior change. • Organic waste is the majority of Conakry’s waste (by weight), so diverting this waste from the landfill represents a significant opportunity. • Each alternative can create employment opportunities for women and youth. The capstone developed numerical models to estimate the capacity of the current system and cost of collection and how that capacity might translate to a waste fee. It added to that initial model a series of variable economic models for three proposed solutions: a mobile buyback program for recyclables, community cookers for organics, and composting for organic waste. Because community cookers and composting have l land and social constraints, the model as developed assumed each could deal with 1% of total waste by weight as a conservative and reachable target that could be scaled with the proper tools. For the mobile buyback program, an assumed 20% of existing waste-employed SMEs would add recycling to their operations, with corresponding potential waste diverted. Using these models and diversion assumptions, the capstone also projected reduced waste fee which could make viable sanitary conditions affordable These models may also be used to assess the funding needed for projects, as well as to justify both diversion methods and fee collection schemes to local governments.</p>