The Hindu Business Line : Way to a zero-waste city

Solid waste management (SWM) is one of the major problems confronting cities in developing countries today. Kerala has ‘hit a blind alley’ in SWM with the failure in Kochi being one of the most reported. However, there is a success story in Pachalam, the 70th electoral Division within the Corporation of Cochin (CoC).

The initiative in this Division covering 0.83 sq km with a population of 7,869 (2001 census) was spearheaded by its Councillor, Advocate Sunil Kumar.

After learning about SWM from local experts, he approached Rajagiri College through their outreach programme asking for student assistance in household surveys and public awareness creation. Four students conducted an initial survey to identify families interested in joining a programme for household-level waste disposal.

Based on the feedback from residents, it was decided that a biogas option would be tested to handle the waste. Residents associations were activated as they are institutional forums for collective decision-making, information sharing, citizen participation and engagement and keeping a close vigil on implementation.

Biogas option

Of the 2,500 households in the Division, around 500 houses had enough land to dispose of the organic waste internally. Around 1,000 families were willing to install small biogas plants in their property. Some of the household biogas plants are being fed by waste from neighbouring houses as well, thus creating a waste exchange system that has made waste a resource.

A waste collection system was introduced for the other families, which was to be linked to decentralised community biogas plants attached to facilities such as wedding halls, marketplaces or even standalone plants built on small parcels of Corporation land.

Since Pachalam has a market, a large biogas plant was to be installed there to handle the market waste and some of the community waste. At present only this community-level plant has been set up though locations for other plants have been identified. The Corporation financed the construction of this plant. The slurry after gas extraction is used in gardens and the scheme is now being widened to encourage and promote kitchen and medicinal gardens.

An NGO, Bio-Oasis, supplies the biogas plant and installs it with the burner in addition to after-sales help. The tank has a capacity of 200 litres and consumes little space, thus making it possible to place it almost anywhere in the open space surrounding the house. For an average household of around five persons, 1-2 hours of gas is generated in the morning, and 0.5-1 hour of gas in the evening.

The system

The waste is segregated into organic, non-biodegradable and recyclables. The typical practice is to keep organic and non-biodegradable waste outside the house in buckets from where it is collected everyday. The project aims to eventually transport this waste to the communal biogas plants.

As all of these have not yet been realised, at present the organic waste is taken daily either to the biogas plant in the market or the secondary collection depot in the Corporation. The non-biodegradables are taken daily to the transfer depot in the Corporation (5 km away).

The door-to-door primary collection service operates on a purely commercial basis providing the service for a fee of Rs 30/household and Rs 70/flat. Even if 2-3 families stay in one unit, it is considered only as one unit, making the service affordable. Each worker earns around Rs 140 (after expenses) in a day that starts at 7.30 a.m. and continues up to 3.30 p.m. Potentially team members can have a second, part-time employment if they so desire.

Recyclables are collected by ragpickers who visit all households, which are paid for this waste. Ragpickers also collect non-recyclable, non-organic waste from households that are not a part of door-to-door collections, but are not paid. Some amount of low quality recyclable waste still enters the daily collection stream. This is retrieved by the collection team and sold back to the ragpickers or to shops. On a rough estimate, it is claimed that Rs 50-70/day for the group can be made from these recyclables.

The concept

Before discussing the uniqueness of the case, we briefly present the conceptual model of the ‘waste hierarchy’ thathas guided practices in SWM worldwide. It involves reduce, reuse, recycle and recover followed by dispose. This means that intervention starts right at the source, products that can be reused must be reused, and after that, waste must be recycled to limit material loss.

Recover suggests exploring possibilities for energy/material recovery to the extent possible (incineration, composting, etc). Only waste residue that cannot be tackled by any of the above possibilities must finally be disposed through landfill.

The Success

Pachalam demonstrates an interesting model. Thus at the household level, where waste is generated, reduce and reuse are achieved through community mobilisation and awareness; storage in buckets, segregation and recycling with recyclable material collected by ragpickers; recovery in the form of biogas as fuel and slurry as fertiliser; and disposal of residue to ragpickers are completed resulting in a ‘zero-waste’ situation if the household so desires.

Given the reality of limited urban space and different lifestyle choices among residents, the second alternative of collecting waste not disposed at household level also operates.

Scalable

The model, which has been operationalised at Pachalam, can be extrapolated to the city level.

It could then involve generation (sweepings from major roads and public spaces), segregation (by ragpickers), recovery (through biogas plant at existing landfill site, reuse of slurry) and disposal (operation of a much smaller landfill site for the residue). As the bulk of the waste (organic and recyclables) in this cyclical model is disposed as it moves through scale, many of the problems accompanying sites handling mixed material is avoided.

This we argue is:

inherently more stable as failure at one point leads only to local failure rather than systemic failure;

resource friendly as all stages in the waste hierarchy is exercised in all scales resulting in an almost complete resource recovery;

easily manageable as at each level (local as well as city) there is less pollution entering the system;

financially viable as at Division level, the system operates through user charges that are publicly accepted;

people sensitive as the processes are democratically mediated (both long and short accountability); and

environmentally sustainable as waste is treated almost simultaneously with its generation/or entry into the particular scale.

This we argue is the ‘hidden success’ within the Pachalam model of SWM.

* * *

Note: The report is a subject of a case study that won an award in Hidden Success, an international contest for the best acadmic papers on India’s urbanisation.

The contest was organised by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Insitute for Financial and Management Research (IFMR), Chennai.

The case will appear in a edited volume to be published by MIT in December 2008. Visit http://hidden-successes.mit.edu for more information.

(The author is a Research Fellow, School of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University.)

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