Martina Otto's Reflections from the Zero Waste Forum 2026

Last week in Istanbul, at the Zero Waste Forum 2026, something became clear to me that no single panel or announcement could have conveyed on its own: the conversation about waste has fundamentally changed. 

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Circularity isn't a niche topic anymore. Governments are legislating for it, financiers are pricing it in, cities are building infrastructure around it. What started as a waste management problem is now being treated as something closer to an economic redesign. 

My own connection to this goes back to law school in Germany, at a time when Klaus Töpfer, later Executive Director of UNEP and someone I was fortunate enough to work with, was already pushing ideas that most people hadn't caught up to yet. His Circular Economy Act, long before "circular economy" became a buzzword, changed the basic logic of how Germany thought about resources. That legislation shaped European policy, and its influence can be felt in much of what's being built today. 

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Seeing that lineage play out in Istanbul, three decades on, was something. 

But the most useful shift in the conversation isn't about better waste management. It's about recognizing that waste is embedded throughout our economies, not just at the end of them. Methane leaking from fossil fuel operations is a wasted resource. 

The recent UK-led Statement on Drastically Reducing Methane Emissions from the Global Fossil Fuel Sector reflects this thinking, treating methane not only as a pollutant but as the loss of a valuable product that should never have escaped into the atmosphere in the first place. Food that never reaches a plate represents wasted land, water, and labor. Catching circularity opportunities at the farm, with organics not going to market rebuilding soil, contributing to better nutrient management. These aren't separate problems with separate solutions; they're the same problem wearing different clothes. 

Zero Waste is as much a resource issue as it is a climate and an economic issue. That's increasingly reflected in how initiatives are being designed, including the No Organic Waste (NOW) effort under the COP30 Action Agenda, which tries to hold food systems, methane reduction, and organic waste in the same frame rather than treating each as a silo, and moving the discussion upstream, connecting value chains. ‘Waste is not waste – until we waste it’ was a catch phrase from the event. At the Climate and Clean Air Coalition, this framing also shapes our work on methane, which drives roughly a third of current warming, as well as our work on other non-CO2 pollutants. 

The waste sector alone accounts for about 20% of global anthropogenic methane emissions, and about 90% of the reductions we need can be made with measures that already exist, at low cost. Waste that is not managed but burned goes up in smoke – contributing to air pollution and climate change. The bottleneck isn't technology; it's the slower work of implementation, financing, and political will. The Lowering Methane Emissions from Organic Waste (LOW-M) initiative, which CCAC coordinates, brings together over 20 organizations that support cities across all continents, filling gaps related to policy, data, and finance. 

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The pressure is real. While improvements in the waste sector in some regions helped us to bend the growth curve of methane, global waste volumes are still climbing – with an outlook of 13% methane emissions growth in this sector by 2030 and over 50 by 2050. Organic waste can make up as much as 50% of municipal solid waste in many developing countries. This, combined with the fact that time matters, before decay kicks in, warrants special attention to organics. Burning wet material is inefficient, and landfilling produces methane even with capture systems. And cities that keep growing simply won't have the land to keep burying the problem. Disposal is not a strategy. 

Instead, working upstream, reducing food loss, separating organics, expanding composting and anaerobic digestion, designing systems that recover value before materials become waste, isn't just an environmental agenda. It creates jobs, reduces costs, improves public health, and opens markets. Composting, biogas, landfill gas recovery: these turn what was a liability into a revenue stream. 

What's slowing this down, almost everywhere, is the same set of problems: weak policy incentives, limited access to finance, and institutions that weren't built for circular thinking. The technology is largely ready. The frameworks aren't. 

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That's what leaves me optimistic after Istanbul. The conversation has moved past the question of whether this is possible. The harder, more interesting question is the one we're now actually asking: what would it take to get there faster?