Waste management is considered in a prospect of social change. Sanitation issues must lead to an Enda urban project which must include political choices and orientations, to ensure a sound impact on the city : waste issues must be indistinctly tied to a political perspective leading to a different urban management. The point is to propose a new political scheme to implement action and decision making on a different scale.
When facing urban matters, participants develop various approaches. The waste issue doesn't make any exception. It is therefore essential to develop exchanges and cooperation between participants to build common consensual projects. Often, if not always, politics are unilaterally elaborated by decision makers without taking people's aspirations and potential into account.
In such an environment, this study brings interrogations on popular economy and 'modernity'. However, what is modern for one is not for the other. It is therefore important to make a difference between a 'true modernity' and what only has its appearance (e.g. : what, of a cart or of a 'clean city truck' is to be considered modern in the West African context ?). Modernity has to do with social change. Thus, one has to wonder how to enhance modernization through technologies, organizing processes and so forth, so that people making a living out of wastes evolve towards a more comfortable situation.
The case study compares the management of household wastes in the cities of Dakar and Thies. In order to make this analysis, both inhabitants and people collecting and recycling waste product were investigated. Results reveal how these two categories perceive environmental problems and the various ways to prepare and evacuate wastes.
This case study leads to the conclusion that recovering and recycling waste products often stands as a profession. Unfortunately, the study also concludes that waste management lacks organization and stability. Thus, in order to last, this activity must concentrate between a few who must specialize in a specific recycled product and, most important, this activity must start to industrialize.
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