While the awareness-raising components of the project had clear benefits, the specific PPP arrangements in the pilot areas do not appear to be sustainable without further external support and to have limited potential for replication. This is especially because the arrangements were often based on voluntarism (e.g. community volunteers doing collection) and were not clearly linked to sustainable financial flows (e.g. how would payments be managed in the long term, who would collect money, how, who would receive it, and so on).
Similarly, the initiatives were not connected to the wider service systems of Penang, such as the bigger waste collection PPPs that operate. As one stakeholder reflected, the project tried to create new systems for collection and recycling, rather than using those which already existed. While the potential clearly exists, the particular models developed during the project did not appear to be optimal.