The waste management industry depends on the consistent implementation and enforcement of strong public health and environmental legislation to create a level playing field for the ‘waste management market'. This question can be answered at many levels: because it is the ‘right’ thing to do, because it is a legal requirement, or because it makes economic sense, as the costs to society of the indiscriminate accumulation, littering, burning and dumping of waste likely exceed the financial costs of environmentally sound waste management. However, in the absence of waste management, or where waste management services are failing, environmental and social negative impacts of waste are much greater, so the focus here is on attempting to estimate the economic costs of inaction, rather than the somewhat lower remaining externalities (economic costs) of environmentally sound waste management. These benefits include avoiding economic costs, the revenues from the sale of recovered products and energy, and also include the wider economic benefits of resource efficiency and waste prevention such as increasing resource and food security and creating green jobs.