25 November 2021, Apia - Papua New Guinea will host the 4th Clean Pacific Roundtable (CPRT) in 2024. The announcement was made during the
closing ceremony of the 3rd CPRT on Thursday, held virtually.
Facilitated by the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP), the CPRT aims to facilitate
networking and dialogue, improve donor coordination, mobilise technical and financial resources and to develop
monitoring and reporting methods on the progress of the Cleaner Pacific 2025.
The Director General of SPREP, Mr Kosi Latu, congratulated PNG for the offer to host the regional face-to-face meeting.
He emphasised the importance of the meeting being the regional mechanism, which empowers cooperation for a cleaner
Pacific environment.
Papua New Guinea with a population of 8.5million people is the largest Pacific Island country and with that comes many
challenges in managing waste.
But the nation has also made very good progress in addressing the challenges and the 2024 meeting will provide an
opportunity to showcase some of the waste management initiatives they have.
One of them is the Total Waste Management (TWM) Roku Integrated Facility in Port Moresby, which aims to provide a
solution for the wider Pacific through controlled handling, treatment and disposal as well as recycling and recovery of
waste resource products.
The first two CPRTs in 2016 and 2018 were held in Suva Fiji.
The third meeting was supposed to have been held in New Caledonia last year but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was
postponed to 2021 and converted to a virtual event, which took place over seven days. Close to a 100 participants from
the government sector, waste and environmental practitioners, development partners, private sector, community, NGOs,
academic and research institutions attended the sessions on a daily basis.
The 3rd Clean Pacific Roundtable was a partnership between SPREP, the Government of New Caledonia as host and Acotred
Pacific, the cluster of Pacific waste collection and treatment professionals. The meeting focused on:
• Creating a safe Pacific Circular Economy
• Waste industry-based enterprise with enhanced public-private partnerships
• Bridging people and waste: Enhancing consciousness in managing waste