Every year, low- and middle-income countries generate hundreds of millions of tonnes of organic and industrial waste—and the infrastructure to manage it is collapsing under the pressure. Research points to subcritical water hydrolysis as a credible alternative to incineration – one that produces reusable outputs, generates no dioxins, and can be deployed at the scale of a single agricultural or food processing facility.
By 2030, the world will produce 82 million tonnes of electronic waste (or e-waste) alone—a 32% increase from 2022 levels, according to the UN Global E-Waste Monitor. However, e-waste is only part of the story. In rapidly urbanizing cities across Southeast Asia, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, organic industrial waste—food residues, livestock manure, medical waste, or seafood processing by-products—is accumulating faster than existing disposal systems can absorb it.
The tipping point came in 2018, when China’s National Sword policy banned the import of 24 categories of solid waste. Overnight, a release valve that the global waste system had depended on for decades shut. Organic and mixed waste that had flowed to Chinese processors began piling up at ports and landfills across Asia. A survey by Japan’s Ministry of the Environment found that 25% of local governments reported waste volumes as “increasing or above guideline limits”, while 35% of waste treatment companies said they were limiting intake due to excess demand.
Japan’s situation illustrates a dynamic that is playing out across the Global South at a larger scale. Despite significant reductions in total waste generation since 2005, Japan’s remaining landfill capacity has continued to decline year-on-year—a function of the sheer volume of incineration residue that still requires land disposal. For middle-income countries which lack Japan’s fiscal resources or infrastructure, the same situation arrives faster and with fewer safety nets.
Municipal solid waste generation
Source: What a Waste 3.0: Global Snapshot of Solid Waste Management Toward Circularity until 2050
Why incineration remains dominant
The standard policy response to waste overload is incineration. It is familiar, it reduces volume, and procurement agencies know how to specify it. But the evidence on its real costs is uncomfortable. Incinerators emit dioxins, furans, and toxic fly ash, requiring specialist secondary disposal. Incineration also requires expensive fuel to burn high-moisture organic waste, a particular problem in tropical climates where food and agricultural streams dominate. And as OECD analysis of waste management and SME practices documents, construction and maintenance costs represent a financial burden that crowds out investment in more sustainable alternatives.
Carbon emissions liability is also mounting. Research published in the Journal of Material Cycles and Waste Management modelled Japan’s waste sector greenhouse gas trajectories and found that incineration-linked emissions are the primary obstacle to reaching net zero in the sector by 2050—even under aggressive recycling scenarios. For countries now committing to Paris-aligned carbon targets, locking in incineration infrastructure is environmentally costly, and risks foreclosing the policy space needed to meet those commitments later.
What the research says about alternatives
Subcritical water hydrolysis has been studied in applied science for over a decade. Research published in BioResources demonstrated that at subcritical conditions—water heated to between 100 and 374°C under pressures up to 22 megapascals—organic materials, including chicken manure, crop waste, and food residues, can be fully decomposed into their constituent molecules, with the resulting liquid phase showing measurable fertilizer value in germination trials. The process requires no chemical additives and produces no combustion by-products.
A separate study in ACS Analytical Chemistry confirmed that subcritical water acts as both acid and base catalyst simultaneously, achieving protein sequence coverages comparable to enzymatic digestion without the cost of enzymes or acids. The practical implication for waste treatment is significant: high-pathogen organic streams that composting and anaerobic digestion struggle to safely process can be fully sterilized through ionic action rather than combustion.
At the industrial deployment scale, systems operating on these principles process up to 3 tonnes of mixed organic waste per 30-minute cycle, with volume reductions of approximately 60% and solid outputs that qualify as compost, feed supplement, or solid fuel depending on input composition. Several such systems are now operational across Japan, including in poultry, food processing, and medical waste applications.
Similar technologies are being deployed commercially across multiple regions, including the UK, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. This suggests that these approaches are not merely theoretical but are already being applied in real-world industrial contexts.
What policymakers and development institutions should do
The gap between available technology and procurement frameworks is well documented. Research on circular economy adoption by SMEs across Europe, East Asia, and Australia consistently shows that inclusion in formal procurement criteria, not just the existence of a technology, drives uptake. The same logic applies at the national and multilateral levels: non-combustion hydrolysis will remain invisible to waste infrastructure tenders unless it is explicitly listed as an eligible technology category.
Development banks like the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, or African Development Bank currently fund waste infrastructure using frameworks that default to incineration or composting. Japan’s own Circular Economy Roadmap, published by the Ministry of the Environment in 2022, sets out the case for transitioning away from incineration as the primary treatment route—an acknowledgment from the country with the world’s most advanced incineration infrastructure that the technology has reached its policy ceiling. Development institutions would do well to read that signal.
Piloting hydrolysis units in agricultural and food processing zones offers the most direct entry point. These are the sites where organic waste is most concentrated, where reuse of the residue as fertilizer is most economically attractive, and where the absence of combustion is most practically valuable—no emissions permits, no planning opposition, no dioxin liability. The waste wall is already here. The question is whether development policy moves fast enough to offer subcritical water hydrolysis, and other technologies like it, a place in infrastructure frameworks before incineration locks in another generation.
