- The Asian Development Bank is financing the rollout of a new digital platform to improve both the solid waste service and the revenue collection in five towns in the Tonle Sap Basin.
- The goal of the digital platform is to enable the city to be able to manage their solid waste collection operation, to improve the service and increase the revenue collected.
- In 2023, the digital solid waste management platform was launched in Battambang, Cambodia’s third largest city. Today, the garbage collection service has many more paying customers and revenue has increased substantially.
Watch the full video here.
With the rapid growth of Cambodia’s urban areas, solid waste has become a major environmental hazard. Uncollected garbage winds up in canals and rivers which flow into Lake Tonle Sap, polluting the largest lake in Southeast Asia. To address the problem, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) has been financing the construction of sanitary landfills, and the rollout of a digital platform to improve solid waste management in five towns in the Tonle Sap Basin. In 2023, the digital solid waste management platform was launched in Battambang, Cambodia’s third largest city. The garbage collection service now has many more paying customers and revenue has increased substantially.
Transcript
Cambodia: Digital Solutions Improve Solid Waste Service
Narration 1:
With the rapid growth of Cambodia’s urban areas, solid waste has become a major environmental hazard and blot on the landscape. Uncollected garbage, especially plastic, winds up in canals and rivers which flow into Lake Tonle Sap, polluting the largest lake in Southeast Asia. The Asian Development Bank has been financing the construction of sanitary landfills in towns and cities in the Tonle Sap Basin to improve solid waste management and protect the Lake.
Alexander Nash
Senior Urban Specialist
Asian Development Bank
Landfills are a really important tool for managing solid waste. But operating landfills well, and collecting the trash regularly has a cost, and in Cambodia this cost is paid for by households and businesses who pay a fee for the service. Of course, if people don’t get a good service, they don’t want to pay for it, and then of course low revenues make delivering a good service impossible. This is known as the “low service, low revenue trap”. To break out of the trap, ADB is financing the rollout of a new digital platform to improve both the solid waste service and the revenue collection in five towns in the Tonle Sap Basin.
Borey Chum
Managing Director
Luma System
The Minister of Environment wanted to find a way to fix the solid waste management problem that existed for many, many years.
The goal of our platform is to enable the city to be able to manage their operation. We started with data collection. We want to understand where the people live, what kind of waste they produce, per day, per week. We are not inventing anything new. We're just putting the existing technology together.
If I am a citizen, I can check my house bill from a mobile app. And what is the schedule that the collection company will come and collect at my house.
City Hall is a little bit more complicated because first, I need to monitor how many bills have been distributed, and how many bills have been paid. They also monitor the collection company performance. If the collection company doesn't perform, the citizen will complain that last two weeks, or last week, the truck does not come and I'm not happy to pay. So city hall needs to go and check. if there's no GPS data of the truck going to that house, meaning it’s true.
Narration 2:
In 2023, the digital solid waste management platform was launched in Battambang, Cambodia’s third largest city. The garbage collection service now has many more paying customers and revenue has increased substantially.
Leang Veasna
City Governor
Battambang
Previously, only about 40% of the 32,000 households in the city received the solid waste service. After implementing this new system by Luma, about 75 to 80 percent Battambang citizens now benefit from the service. The plan and vision of the city is to achieve 90 to 95% coverage to make Battambang a clean and smart city.
Touch Vanthin
Resident, Battambang City
Question: What are you here for?
Paying for garbage collection.
The current fee is higher than the previous one. It is because the service has improved to a higher standard and the new system needs to be paid for.
Borey Chum
Managing Director
Luma System
If you want your city to be clean, sustainable, no solid waste so that you can live in a clean environment, there's a price to pay. Every one of us has to pay it.
