Waste Management

Yesterday, I told you how I managed to learn solid waste management techniques from one of the pioneers in the industry. The two-day training I attended with Mr Srinivasan, a relentless advocate of efficient waste management, helped our township walk down the path of implementing those techniques. Mr Srinivasan is the Apex Monitoring Committee Special Invitee to National Green Tribunal (NGT), New Delhi and a resource person from Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Government of India, that is implementing the Swachh Bharat Mission. On request, he made a visit to our Lokhandwala Township in Kandivali East in September 2019.…

Mumbai generates about 11,000 tonnes of solid waste every day, according to estimates from Central Pollution Control Board, 2015-16. The Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) is formally responsible for its management.  The unexpected entry of COVID-19, has pushed solid waste management to the background. While the focus is on minimising the spread of the virus and saving lives at this time, we cannot ignore the waste that we are continuing to increasingly generate due to the pandemic. In order for us to leave a better planet to the future generation, we have to roll up our sleeves and get our hands…

In the AC (After Corona) times, waste management systems across cities have borne the brunt, especially in developing countries where robust collection and processing systems are not streamlined. One area, which requires a lot of attention and work is plastic waste management, more so, because, addressing plastic waste leakage and gearing up to shift mindsets towards sustainable consumption of this resource material has become a challenge. In addition to this, are the faulty municipal systems that do not support segregation and sorting. In the Indian context, we are clearly seeing an increase in plastic waste consumption. While earlier in January,…

The COVID-19 outbreak has slowed down Solid Waste Management (SWM) across the city, with all the composting and segregation centres in 162 locations closed. Most residential areas and other gated communities have struggled to segregate their waste during the lockdown due to the lack of in-house waste management facilities and staff. Awareness around the subject is low, and the motivation to initiate the process is also missing. However, in the midst of this, The Atrium, an apartment complex in Thiruvanmiyur has managed to keep the operations of waste management going. The Atrium community started waste segregation with a systematic and…

We are a regular Mumbaikar working-couple and spend a big part of our everyday life between work and commute. The rising levels of pollution we were experiencing in a mega-city like Mumbai always bothered us. Urban pollution, as well as the threat to contamination of natural resources, is a global problem, and in a developing country like ours, the municipal land-fills stand out on this front. We knew about the Deonar dumping ground fire in 2017 and the accompanying air pollution. This could have been avoided if, as a city, we knew how to better manage the volume of waste…

Management of solid waste has been a persistent issue for various cities. Chennai has been grappling to find ways to deal with its burgeoning quantum of waste and has tried out several experiments centered around decentralisation, starting from the early 2000s. While the city’s progress on this front has been patchy, some signs of promise had begun to sprout just before the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Prior to lockdown Chennai made crucial strides towards decentralised waste management with a pilot project  in Anna Nagar, that saw a significant reduction in waste sent to the landfills. The Zero Waste initiative…

Gurugram’s population of almost 9 lakhs, has one Common Biomedical Waste Treatment Facility (CBWTF) for its collection, transportation and treatment - authorized by the Haryana State Pollution Control Board. In the wake of the pandemic, this CBWTF has faced unprecedented demand from the residential sector to collect and process their COVID-19 biomedical waste as a part of its service. The agency, RWAs and the Municipal Corporation of Gurugram (MCG) have been grappling with many challenges, as they attempt to streamline and ensure safe, regular collection and treatment of contaminated biomedical waste from quarantine homes. Post pandemic, in Gurugram, new collection…

Imagine 2600 trucks laden with plastic waste plying across cities, depositing them at waste processing centres to the extent that they can handle it, and merely dumping the rest at various spots. Well, that is the amount of plastic waste that India generates daily -- a massive 26000 MT of plastic waste every day. And that is precisely why solutions like those being tried out in the hill town of Dehradun may emerge as an example for all our cities, as they try to tackle the growing problem of plastic pollution. Despite several regulations and policies, single-use plastic continues to…

Every day at 7 am sharp, 55-year-old Meenakshiammal arrives at the Sathyamoorthy Nagar community toilet in Tiruchirapalli, from her home in a slum close by. She has been cleaning two community toilets for the past 15 years, one on Uppiliar Street and the other at Sathyamoorthy Nagar, spending at least an hour cleaning each one of them. A cleaning agent and a broom were just enough for her until now, but things have changed drastically since the spread of COVID-19 in India and the consequent lockdown. She now wears a mask, gloves and ensures that she washes her hands and…

https://soundcloud.com/citizenmatters/ep1-lessons-from-bengaluru-cm If you live in Bengaluru, you just cannot avoid the city's waste management problem. Footpaths that are stinking and littered with waste are a common sight. This first episode of 'Lessons from Bengaluru' podcast series explores Bengaluru's waste management problem, and what citizens are doing to address it. Sandhya Narayanan of the Solid Waste Management Round Table (SWMRT) describes how the city's rapid growth from the early 2000s worsened the waste management problem. SWMRT has played a key role in identifying solutions to the issue and holding civic authorities accountable. Lalitha Mondreti, also part of SWMRT, explains the 2…