What a waste!
By Romsha Vats
Ever since we, human beings, have learnt to walk upright and live collaboratively, we’ve left a trail of waste behind us. The composition of our waste, much like our cognitive development, has evolved from simple to complex. It has also increased in both variety and quantity over the millennia.
A large quantum of the waste generated by early humans easily biodegraded, given its simple chemical and molecular structure. However, soon, man learned to manipulate the knowledge of chemistry to fashion newer, more resilient substances, such as plastics, polymers, glass, etc. Terrestrial bacteria were not well-equipped to break these substances down, at least not with the speed they metabolised waste of yesteryears.
This natural chain of events has left us with insurmountable waste and very little clue. Akin to a child stuffing his unfolded laundry into the deep crevices of their wardrobe, human beings have also dumped their waste at places near the edge of human civilisation, such as landfills, wastelands, or abandoned deserts. According to BBC, an estimated 60,000 tons of clothes from Europe, Asia, and North America take up space in Chile’s Atacama Desert.
Even the most economically developed countries haven’t found a way around this issue. They’ve created infamous hotspots, like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, to house their garbage. Furthermore, many rich nations continue to export huge quantities of plastic, metal, and electronic waste to poor nations, who do not possess the requisite infrastructure or technology to properly deal with them.
What is the way forward then? To find another planet to toss away our waste? Some technocrats might consider this as a plausible solution. But there are more realistic ways to deal with this menace. For instance — Germany, one of the top recyclers in the world, requires households to segregate their wastes into five colour-coded bins — blue, yellow, brown, grey, and glass (brown, green, and white). In public areas, Germany has provisions for bottle return machines as well as electronics and battery recycling bins.
Indore, the cleanest Indian city in the Swachch Bharat Index, has won accolades for its ambitious project of clearing landfills to segregate and process legacy waste for further use. However, this is a rare instance of quick executive action. The Swachch Bharat Mission 2.0 has, on similar lines, asked million+ cities to remediate existing dumpsites by 2024. While this is a good step to deal with legacy waste, it is not a long-lasting solution to the problem of waste management.
In an ideal world, households must shoulder the responsibility of segregating waste at source. In most localities of Delhi NCR, the municipal workers take on the work of (manually) segregating waste after they have collected it in bulk. In Pune, waste-pickers are more vocal about asking people to give them pre-segregated waste. It’s safe to say that there is no uniform waste collection policy across India.
This has, in large parts, to do with ‘solid waste management’ being a part of the State list subjects. Thus, even though the Centre has brought out a slew of waste management rules about diverse waste categories, such as plastic, biomedical, electronic, etc.; their adoption and implementation continues to be uneven across different states.
While India has managed to reach the target of 100% collection of municipal solid waste, it continues to lag behind in segregation and processing of said waste. Without proper segregation, garbage either goes to landfills or gets incinerated, neither of which are ideal. To make matters worse, lack of waste segregation prevents us from recycling plastic, metallic, paper, and cloth-based resources. It’s apparent that segregation of waste has multiplier benefits for the society and environment. This makes it necessary to put it at the centre of waste management policy in India.
Without the active involvement of citizens, achieving 100% segregation across the country will be a difficult feat. There’s a need to implement large-scale campaigns to affect this change in our people. MyGate apps can be leveraged to spread the word about segregation at source. Resident Welfare Associations can be made important stakeholders in ensuring that waste gets separated before it’s sent for processing. With the advent of influencer marketing gaining ground, there’s more avenues to spread the word about waste segregation than ever before.
Once segregation becomes a given, waste processing businesses will have a more certain inflow of raw material, which shall make them more profitable ventures in the long run. Furthermore, to provide momentum to this industry, the government can make provisions for tax breaks and subsidies for the initial few years. In a world where AI is taking over, the waste processing sector could prove to be an assured employment provider for our upcoming generations.
The bottom line is that segregation at source can only become a sustainable practice if citizens, governments, civil society, and markets work in tandem to create a reinforcing ecosystem for it. While completely eliminating waste is not an actual possibility, working towards its prudent management is a realistic and achievable goal.
Romsha Vats is currently a student of the GCPP (Advanced Public Policy) Programme. Read the original piece here.
Cover Image credits: Freepik