Manila, Feb 15, 2007 (ABN Newswire) - Asian Development Bank (ASX: ATB) is this week hosting a meeting focusing on waste management and efficient use of resources in East and Southeast Asia.

Asia's urban areas generate an estimated 760,000 tons of waste a day, an amount that is expected to rise to 1.8 million tons per day by 2025. The growing scale of Asia's waste problems are beyond the capacity of the public sector to deal with. Innovative private sector and public-private partnerships for investment are therefore needed to help the region meet its waste management needs.

At the meeting, participants will share experiences and identify opportunities for investments in waste and resource management, and policies and programs that could be adopted into national strategies.

Participants will include officials from governments and the private sector, academics, international organizations, nongovernment organizations, as well as ADB.

The event, organized jointly with the United Nations Environment Programme, United Nations Centre for Regional Development, and the Institute of Global Environment and Society, is the second in a series that began in Kathmandu last August.

The workshops are part of an ADB review of issues connected with the "3Rs" - reduce, reuse, and recycle - in waste management. This will form the basis for an ADB report to be released later this year. The 3R Initiative was launched in 2005 in Tokyo based on the agreement of G-8 countries to promote a more efficient way of production and consumption connected to a wide range of environment conservation actions including international cooperation.