This report was prepared by a team led by Victor Vergara (co-task team leader) and Ramachandra Jammi (co-task team leader) including Victoria Alexeeva, Linda Godfrey, Vijay Jagannathan, Ebru Karamete, Kavita Mathur, Chikako Miwa, Ozlem Onerci, Gouthami Padam, Mari-Noelle Roquiz, Ichiro Toda, and Hiroyuki Yokoi. Aarre Laakso assisted with structural editing and line editing. Emelda Cudilla and Romayne Pereira provided administrative assistance. Lauren Kelly provided valuable input and guidance during the preparation of the report’s final draft. The evaluation was conducted under the guidance and supervision of Marialisa Motta (manager), José Carbajo Martínez (former director, Finance, Private Sector, and Sustainable Development), Carmen Nonay (director, Finance, Private Sector, and Sustainable Development) and Alison Evans (Director-General, Independent Evaluation Group). The evaluation drew on background papers on plastics pollution (by Steve Fletcher) and informal waste pickers (by Sonia Dias). The team is grateful to various managers and staff of several of the World Bank Group’s Global Practices (the Environment, Natural Resources, and Blue Economy Global Practice; the Urban, Disaster Risk Management, Resilience, and Land Global Practice; and the Water Global Practice); the International Finance Corporation through the Global Infrastructure team (Municipal and Environmental Infrastructure); the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (Infrastructure); the World Bank Country Management Units and staff; and government and implementing agency officials of Azerbaijan, China, Colombia, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, and West Bank and Gaza for their input and time.

The report was peer reviewed by Antonis Mavropoulos (founder and chief executive officer of D-Waste and former president of the International Solid Waste Association); Dr. Suneel Pandey (senior fellow and director, Environment and Waste Management Division, The Energy and Resources Institute, New Delhi, India); and Masato Ohno (chair and director, EX Research Institute, Tokyo, Japan, and director of the Japan Waste Research Foundation).