Waste Management

Imagine you’re about to go to bed after a long and tiring day’s work. And at that very moment, you hear the dreaded sound of those heavy drilling machines from a house next to yours, as part of some work that looks likely to continue late into the night. Or imagine having to deal with the constant menace of dust pollution in your homes and locality because of some building activity in the neighbourhood. Perhaps not so difficult to imagine, given that it is a common issue that residents of India’s metro cities, including Chennai, have been facing for years:…

Anu pushes her overloaded trolley past the supermarket door, towards her car. At home, she empties the contents of her bag onto the counter and then goes about emptying packets into her storage containers -  Biscuits, Dry Fruits, Pulses, Spices. She is left with the discarded packets — most of which can be termed plastic packaging waste — that she places in the bag kept aside for recycling. Her bag already contains some takeaway boxes,  yogurt containers, a flour (atta) packet, chocolate wrappers, some personal care and cleaning containers. As a citizen, she has done her job of ensuring that…

On October 1st, a day before Gandhi Jayanti, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a sequel to his flagship and equally lauded and critiqued programme, the Swachh Bharat Mission. The aim of  Swachh Bharat 2.0, added Modi, is to make “urban areas garbage free”. He stressed that in the second phase, “the garbage mounds in cities will be processed and removed completely. We are processing about 70% of the daily waste; the next step is to take it to 100%.” Swachh Bharat 2.0 will also focus on source segregation of solid waste, utilising the principles of 3R’s (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle), scientific…

The Centre's Ministry of Environment, Forest  & Climate Change recently notified the  Plastic Waste Management (PWM) Amendment Rules, 2021, to phase out certain types of single-use plastics by 2022. The ban applies to the manufacture, sale, use, import and handling  of some plastic items. The amendment is in line with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s commitment of eliminating single-use plastic by 2022. What is single-use plastic? According to the PWM Rules, 2021, ‘single-use plastic commodity’ means a plastic item intended to be used once, before being disposed of or recycled.  The Expert Committee on ‘Single Use Plastics’, constituted by the Department of…

There is value in sifting through the remains of what we discard. And each act of sifting, collecting, sorting, grading, trading is a revolution of sorts. But what does this have to do with Extended Producer’s Responsibility (EPR)? The moment of truth came in when my colleague Krishna, a former child waste picker and a manager of a dry waste collection Centre in Bengaluru, made a statement at one of the meetings on Inclusive EPR. “We talk about producers' responsibility and stewardship, in terms of environment and economic angle but there is a more pressing issue that needs to be…

It is not every day that the citizens of Gurgaon leave work on a Tuesday morning to congregate at the approximately 45 m-high Bandhwari landfill, shared by Gurgaon and Faridabad, where over 2000 tons of mixed waste is dumped every day. On the morning of August 31st, however, rain could not deter close to 200 residents of villages from Mangar, Bandhwari, Gwal Pahari and the city of Gurgaon, who gathered there to attend a public hearing called by the Haryana Pollution Control Board (HSPCB). The hearing sought citizen’s thoughts on the proposed expansion of the Waste to Energy Plant (WtE)…

Are you fed up with buying plastic-laden things and looking to change? Citizen Consumer and Civic Action Group (CAG), an NGO based in Chennai, will shortly be launching an app, Go Zero Waste, that seeks to list shops across Tamil Nadu and even India, where you can shop plastic-free. This app will serve as a resource for those citizens keen to break free from the convention and habit of using plastic, and help them find local shops that avoid plastic packaging.  As the first step to sharing this invaluable resource, CAG is crowdsourcing information on the shops through this form…

Scenario 1: It’s Friday night, and Kiran decides to order some burger, fries, and a bottle of soft drink to go with it. He finishes drinking the beverage and puts the bottle in the recycle bag, with all his other dry waste, and places the bag out, on the day BBMP workers pick up recyclables. Scenario 2: Anita is hosting a birthday party, and she orders soft drinks, along with other snacks and beverages.. Post the party all the bottles go into the recycle bag that is placed outside her apartment door. Scenario 3: Jayamma, is a pourakarmika, in Ward…

International Forum for Environment, Sustainability and Technology (iFOREST), has released two reports on baseline studies of solid and plastic waste in Haridwar and Rishikesh. Both of these are Ganga cities, and understanding their waste generation and management practices are significant for Ganga rejuvenation. At the same time, the Delhi-based environmental organization, has come out with an India-specific methodology for developing solid and plastic waste inventory for Indian cities. Presenting the city reports, Chandra Bhushan, CEO of iFOREST said “One of the major challenges we faced was absence of any specific methodology to develop an inventory. This study provided us an…

As the tourism industry prepares for recovery with all due safety procedures, the need for proper waste management in tourist cities cannot be undermined. The pandemic has underscored the need for sustainable waste management, while protecting the safety of the waste handlers and the  environment.  The pandemic has hit India’s tourism sector particularly hard, as we see from the statistics cited lated in the article. And as the unlock process starts, with the government announcing some special incentives to revive the tourism sector, there is a particular urgency for popular tourist destinations, from hill regions to cities like Jaipur and…