Waste Management

As Dr Alby John Varghese, the 31-year-old Regional Deputy Commissioner (South) of Chennai Corporation took some time to rest, he was pleased to see the way things were being handled by his efficient team during the "Reuse and Reduce Sale." Citizens were called upon to donate various lightly-used items that were still in usable condition but which they no longer needed. We managed to steal some time from his schedule for a quick tête-à-tête and understand how he and his team pulled this off. How did you come up with the initiative? Alby John Varghese, IAS The concept of the…

Residents of Kasturba Nagar Association (ROKA), a RWA in Chennai, have streamlined their waste management using simple practices and in the third week of December, within three months of starting focused door-to-door collection, managed to hit the magic mark of 1 TPD (tonne per day) of organic kitchen waste collected for composting!! On an average, 800-850 kgs of wet waste is now being collected from four main roads in the neighbourhood, and sent to a municipal compost yard for processing.  Members of this RWA achieved this through a series of events and planning and sensitisation meetings. They hosted events such…

Near the city centre, the clock tower, is the gleaming ‘mobile lane’, home to around 40 shops selling all varieties of mobile phones and electronic accessories. This creates a new problem for the city’s waste management authorities -- managing the increasing amounts of e-waste being generated. Significantly, the state’s pollution control board does not have a dedicated database on e-waste as it does on solid waste or plastic waste (available on its website). The state with 13 districts has only seven registered e-waste dismantlers and recyclers. Authorisation for all these e-waste dismantlers and recyclers seems to have expired in 2018,…

Pushing a rickety tricycle and making multiple stops to collect waste from households is a Herculean task for conservancy workers. As the day progresses, the vehicle gets progressively heavier with heaps of garbage but the worker still pushes it, going door to door to collect the waste.   "Every part of my body aches, literally," said a conservancy worker, who has been in the job for over 15 years. The long term health effects of their work on these blue-collared workers include persistent shoulder and back pain.  But there is some good news for them.  This troublesome situation could soon become…

The big money plans for waste treatment remain on paper. But a small community-oriented scheme for waste treatment, which was a small part of that big plan, is showing promise. Trash to cash is not just a cliché for this diverse group of poor women in Shillong. Earning a livelihood as waste pickers earlier, these women have banded together as a self-help group to sift and convert bio degradable waste dumped at a nearby landfill into saleable compost. Shillong, as most of Meghalaya today, faces an ugly garbage crisis that threatens to wipe out her claim as the queen of…

A study by Toxics Link, a Delhi-based environmental research and advocacy non-profit identified 15 e-waste processing hotspots in Delhi operating with impunity without safeguards. These hotspots house over 5,000 illegal e-waste processing units directly and indirectly, employing over 50,000 people. The sheer scale of the violation of environmental norms highlights the failure of the system, especially of the E-waste (Management) Rules 2016. The study states that many authorised dismantlers and recyclers are selling waste to the informal sector, in complete contravention of the law. The CPCB website currently does not provide their list of authorized vendors as mandated by the…

Television channels and newspapers could not stop talking about Kashmir. Every news bulletin, every panel discussion, every TV debate was about Kashmir and its people. Yet, what media did not, or could not, cover was the everyday ordeal in a city of close to two million, where municipal workers had not been able to report to duty for 10 days. Srinagar was stinking. All normal operations were suspended in Srinagar from August 5th, following abrogation of Article 370. Within a few days, residents started to complain of chest discomfort, frequent sneezing, mild cough and allergies due to the foul smell…

With India's mammoth generation of 26000 tons of plastic waste daily, Indian cities are struggling to manage their plastic waste, with single use plastic (SUP) posing a major challenge. So much so that the Modi government's big decision to ban SUP from October 2, Gandhi Jayanti, was shelved as the market was not ready to take such a toll without proper alternatives to plastic in place. However, the government's recent Swachhata Hi Seva (SHS) campaign, which aims at large scale collection and recycling of plastic waste, is being actively pursued by state governments. The campaign involves concepts like plogging, cleanups…

Palampur is a picturesque Himalayan town in Kangra district, in the foothills of the majestic Dhauladhar mountains and the gateway to the popular Kullu-Manali tourist destinations. Surrounded by lush green tea gardens growing the famous Kangra tea, which was first planted in Palampur, the town is also home to CSIR’s Institute of Biosource Technology. Sadly, barring some localities and the town’s peripheral belt, the once pretty lanes of this town are today lined with garbage heaps dumped haphazardly at some spots.  “We need to find answers to fix this problem,” said former Chief Minister Shanta Kumar, who hails from Palampur.…

In roughly a week from now, the city of Kolkata will be transformed into a spectacular carnival, a moving stream of countless heads, as tens of thousands descend on its roads to celebrate Durga Puja. In the capital Kolkata, this marks a magical celebration of not only the homecoming of Goddess Durga and her four children – Lakshmi, Saraswati, Kartik and Ganesh -- but of art, creativity and life itself.  During the festival spanning five-days, Kolkata is decked up like a bride. ‘Pandals’, which look more like film sets these days, pop up across the city, where devotees will seek…