Waste Management: India's Next Big Challenge

    • IANS
    • Publish Date: Jul 31 2018 12:15PM
    • |
    • Updated Date: Jul 31 2018 12:15PM
Waste Management: India's Next Big Challenge

In ‘Waste of a Nation: Garbage and Growth in India,’ authors Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey provide a comprehensive account of India’s waste problem. In the process, they explore its implication in relation to economic growth, public health and natural resources... 

Q: Why did Indians start generating so much waste?
The growing production and use of consumer goods after ‘liberalisation’ in 1991 is the reason. Toothpaste is a telling example. In the 1970s, one estimate reckoned that India produced 1,200 tons of toothpaste a year. By 2015, estimates suggested that India consumed 80,000 tons of toothpaste annually. That would mean 800 million tubes. Toothpaste tubes don’t decompose and are notoriously hard to recycle. It’s not hard to think of similar examples that mark the arrival of a manufactured, packaged, consumerist way of life.

Q:What are the biggest challenges in India’s waste management?
For household waste, perhaps the greatest challenge is getting people to change their habits. Behavioural change is difficult to instigate. Even poor people have come to depend on fast-moving consumer goods which come in disposable sachets – from packets of paan masala to shampoo. The resulting waste is pervasive, yet its everyday quality makes it unnoticeable, compared to the spectacular nature of Delhi’s air pollution in the winter. For industrial-scale waste — construction and demolition, toxic and hazardous — regulation and enforcement are difficult. The cost of neutralising or re-purposing such material is often a disincentive for businesses. They break the rules, and regulators are unwilling or unable to enforce compliance.

Q:What is the next best alternative to landfills, given the tremendously short supply of space in cities?
The quick — and wrong — answer is often: incineration. Burn things. There’s even the promise of generating some electric power out of the combustion. High-temperature incineration works in Japan, Singapore and parts of northern Europe. But these incinerators are expensive, and need relentless maintenance. A better way, especially for India — and authorities try to practise it in some places — is decentralised processing, down to the ward level. Much of India’s household waste is biodegradable and can be turned into good compost and even made to produce a little electricity.  Decentralised sorting stations for waste-pickers enable recyclables to be collected and moved economically. What’s left can be compressed into bales and turned into fuel useful in cement factories. 

Q: Readers, how should we tackle the problem if waste management? 

 

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Comments

D Sowmika AMRITA VIDYALAYAM SR SEC SCH

I think it all starts with us. There are municipal bins on the roads and we should throw the waste in them instead of throwing it on roads

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