TIME was when waste never went outside the compound. Waste was a private affair and therefore privately managed. Today families can no longer manage their own waste hence it has become a public responsibility. The Centre for Science and Environment, New Delhi made some startling revelations regarding solid waste. In a book titled, “Not in my backyard,” (NIMBY), CSE looks at solid waste management (no longer solid waste disposal) across cities in India and finds that while the poor do not generate as much garbage as the affluent, they bear the brunt of bad health when solid waste is dumped in landfills in their backyards, since landfills are mostly located away from urban centres. Three cities in India, namely Panaji, Alleppey and Mysuru have been able to successfully manage solid waste by organising the entire process through community participation. CSE found that the only reason why Indians are not drowned by garbage is because of the rag pickers who relentless do their job of picking up the recyclable elements such as plastics from landfills etc. Yet these poor people are treated with disdain and not given any importance by government and not even incentivised for doing a public service.
CSE cautioned against grand schemes of converting garbage to power since this project requires waste with calorific value which is not easy to come by. Hence several hundreds of Waste to Energy (WTE) projects have now become nonperforming assets. India has lost nearly 15 years in this experiment.
States like Meghalaya don’t seem to have done enough research in this area and those at the helm still talk of WTE projects as a silver bullet of managing waste smartly but the reality is that many such plants have closed down. Cities that have managed their garbage successfully did so by creating community waste management systems that transform wet, biodegradable waste into manure, while recycling other non-biodegradable waste so that the product is reusable. WTE works only if waste is segregated at source and if emission standards of the plants are stringently measured and monitoring standards are credible. India does not yet have the capacity to measure dioxin and furans – the toxic elements generated while converting waste to energy. CSE’s studies reveal that payment for services provided by the Municipality or other service providers who collect waste and manage it has now become inevitable. People have to pay for the garbage they generate – the more the garbage the higher the payment. It is time to re-imagine garbage management system because as Sunita Narain of the CSE says “If garbage is in someone else’s backyard today then very soon it will have to be in our front yards and no one would like that. Indeed garbage might be our worst nightmare if it has not already become one. Yet our thinking has not progressed beyond the clichéd paradigms.