During the latest war in Gaza, between October 2023 and November 2025, around 900,000 tonnes of waste accumulated, with only half of it collected. Beyond the loss of approximately 70,000 lives, the conflict also devastated the environment: the waste management system collapsed, landfills became unusable and garbage piled up everywhere.

Having led the United Nations Development Programme’s Gaza Office for 18 months years, Alessandro Mrakic has witnessed the dangerous buildup of solid waste in Gaza’s streets, including medical waste such as IV drips, empty blood bags and syringes. He paints an unsettling picture of the Firas Market dumpsite in the heart of Gaza City: a 13-metre-high mountain of waste, where there was once a bustling economic hub.

UNDP is running a series of operations to manage solid waste in Gaza, providing equipment and technical support. To date, over 600,000 tons of solid waste have been collected in the Gaza Strip, benefitting 1.4 million people. By mid-2026, the 300,000 cubic meters of waste that has accumulated in Firas Market will be fully transferred to a temporary landfill. Slowly, waste separation is beginning, at least for plastics and metals, with plans to compact the latter. But the scale is overwhelming, and sustained access to equipment is a necessity.

“We have purchased a medical waste microwave, and we are waiting for all the necessary permits to import it into Gaza,” Mrakic explains. “I have worked in other contexts during humanitarian crises where waste management was still occurring; in Gaza, this is no longer possible. Moreover, due to the lack of space, people and waste coexist in extremely confined areas; tents are set up next to landfills, with all the associated health risks.”

In Gaza, the entire waste management chain has collapsed. The medical waste microwave is an emergency solution, as after the war there are no operational landfills, no equipment to manage waste sites, only one-fifth of waste collection trucks still functioning, and a drastic shortage of bins. UNDP, in coordination with local partners and the WASH Cluster, has provided 50 waste collection vehicles, the rehabilitation of two dumping sites, as well as additional equipment and services.

Amid this sea of waste, some categories are particularly critical: “During a humanitarian crisis, medical waste is extremely difficult to manage. In Gaza, with the limited means and equipment available, we try to separate it and store it at three sites. We have procured equipment to treat the medical waste, but access is urgently required,” Mrakic explains.

Why focus on humanitarian crises?

In Murcia, Spain, the European project ANIPH aims to contribute tackling this emergency by designing fully biodegradable bioplastic wound dressings and recyclable water-barrier packaging, including adhesives, gauze and antibiotical components. In extreme crisis scenarios, it may seem like addressing a drop in the ocean, yet “The consortium prioritised them because they combine three factors at once: high volumes of single-use waste, limited or absent waste infrastructure, and a clear need for materials that can deliver medical performance while reducing long-term environmental harm”, explains its coordinator, Carmen Fernández Ayuso, from CETEC (Spain). The project is built around the concept of programmed biodegradation, meaning that materials are designed to degrade according to their composition, format and receiving environment: whether soil, freshwater or marine systems.

This is particularly relevant in crisis settings, where a lot of products often end up in the environment without any formal waste collection system. As Marie Šmídová from the NGO People in Need explains: “What happens is that the waste produced by the humanitarian actors is mixed with the waste that's already existing there. Because it's very rare that the crisis happens in a perfect scenario where all the waste was sorted perfectly before. Very rare. So the majority of the context we are working in is the so-called protracted crisis”.

People in Need is involved in the Bio4Human project, which connects humanitarian actors and the bio-based sector to identify sustainable waste solutions. In protracted crises, however, waste management and tracking remain extremely difficult.

Julien Lugwarha, Climate Resilience Coordinator for People in Need, recalls his experience in the Democratic Republic of Congo, when the M23 non-State paramilitary group seized control of parts of the country: “We had to follow clinics wherever they went and during this first stage of emergency, we didn't think much about how we were going to manage the waste”. In the early emergency phase, large volumes of essential kits are distributed, and humanitarian waste quickly merges with local waste streams, making it extremely difficult to quantify and even harder to manage. And as Lugwarha points out, plastic waste remains the dominant category.

Biodegradable bioplastic wound dressings: “safe and sustainable by design”

ANIPH is still at an early stage, with its first prototype expected within the next two years. Yet, the adoption of its value chain is expected to deliver, at a large scale, annual savings of 22.43 kt of crude oil, thanks to a reduction in CO₂ emissions of between 43% and 68% compared to fossil-based packaging and dressings. “The biobased and biodegradable plastic products (BBpPs) developed within the project belong to the PHA biopolymer family. Now we are developing the formulation. We work with two types of PHAs: the first is a PHBV produced by us from the brewery industry residues and sugar residues. The second is an elastomeric PHA produced by a Canadian company to make the adhesives for the wound dressing and for the packaging. They are also developing a PHA based coating for the packaging to provide water barrier properties”, explains ANIPH project coordinator Carmen Fernández Ayuso from CETEC (Spain).

The industries supplying the raw materials are based in the Murcia region, close to the fermentation facilities, where the fermentative process can take place without the need for sterilisation with a high degree of sustainability. This approach aligns with the EU framework of Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD), which aims to integrate safety and environmental considerations from the earliest stages of material development.

Probiotics instead of antibiotics and the challenge of resistance

The project also involves the University of Granada, which is developing an alternative to conventional antibiotics for wound healing. “We use probiotic cellulose for wound healing that is quite innovative to avoid antibiotics – Fernández Ayuso explains – when the probiotics are with the cellulose the healing properties are increased”.

However, significant technical challenges remain, particularly resistance and flexibility. For PHBV, the biopolymer used to manufacture both wound dressings and their protective packaging, current commercial grades often suffer from limited processability and struggle to meet performance requirements, especially in flexible and semi-flexible applications. ANIPH addresses this by increasing the 3HV comonomer content in PHBV, reducing crystallinity and making the material more flexible and easier to process.

Biodegradable beyond crisis contexts

To support biodegradability across all conditions ANIPH is also developing an AI predictive tool to design safer, biodegradable alternatives to conventional plastics. By using machine learning to model the properties of PHA-based biopolymers, including performance, biodegradability and potential risks, the tool allows researchers to optimise materials at an early stage, reducing the need for time-consuming laboratory testing. This approach accelerates the development of plastics that are both functional and environmentally safe. Could such solutions be useful beyond humanitarian aid, for example into hospitals? “Given that wound dressings cannot be recycled due to contamination with human fluids, the answer is potentially yes”, Fernández Ayuso explains: “ANIPH is building the technical and scientific basis for future adoption in mainstream healthcare, even if it is not claiming immediate market deployment in hospitals”.

Article by Gioia Salvatori

Photo by Julie Ricard  Unsplash

Contacts

Project Coordinator: coordinator@aniph.eu
Communication Secretariat: info@aniph.eu

Project website & social media

https://aniph.eu/

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