Some American tips for a swach Bharat

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made impassioned pleas for a swach Bharat, a clean India. But how to get there? Perhaps he can pick up some pointers on his forthcoming visit to the US.

At about 250 million tonnes per annum, the US is, expectedly, generating more mountains of trash than India’s 60 million tonnes per annum. But India is facing community anger from villages who don’t want to be dumpsites of cities like Bangalore.

Public interest litigations abound, often from citizens tired of leaking landfills and dumps, polluting waste-to-energy plants and poor waste collection.

The US has its own set of problems. It generates too much waste, and wastes too much usable stuff. A joke amongst environmentalists there is that if you stand long enough at an American landfill, you can gather enough white goods and furniture to run a decent home: many Americans trash things they don’t like, not just things that have ceased to be functional.

In the past, America tried to resolve the problem by exporting its trash to the developing world. But with a global backlash, it has had to start sorting out its problem at home, using innovation, common sense and incentives.

No American state offers India as many lessons as California. In San Francisco, anything that can be composted or recycled, or is hazardous, simply cannot enter a landfill. The city focuses on reduction. “Buy less”, the city tells its people constantly; also “bottled water is bad for the environment”.

Working backwards, the city has pushed composting at all levels and offers composting services via its green bin system, trains citizens to compost, and offers awareness materials for the public to use and disseminate.

Financial incentives linked to Pay-As-You-Throw are in place, and restaurants are not allowed to serve or pack food in unrecyclable Styrofoam; only compostable plates and cutlery are allowed. It demands producer responsibility even for cigarette butt litter, charging a fee per packet sold, to pay for the clean-up.

Then there is Los Angeles, a city whose solid waste integrated resource plan (SWIRP) is based on systems thinking. LA conceptualises waste first as materials in order to control what and how much of every material is finally discarded and at what cost.

Its plans include manufacturing and packaging (important sources of trash), use of more easy to handle products, and finally disposal. These systems are far removed from the Indian approach, which ignores the safe recyclability and handling of products or waste reduction, or even making manufacturers responsible.

If there are take-aways from all this, they are these: It is not technology that is key to the waste problem. Waste can be well managed only if it is planned for in advance of its existence, using incentives and systems while it is still an intact product. Food and organic waste is the key to waste handling, and there is no shortcut to engaging in quality public awareness. It’s an expensive proposition but a common feature across successful cities.

For all its visible dirt, India has much to offer too. Middle-class Indians still depend on many sustainable practices which Americans should take heed of. All over San Francisco and New York, for example, migrants and the poor pick up aluminium cans from dustbins, selling them to survive.

These are no different from India’s waste-pickers, except that they stand entirely unrecognised. Including them, as India is starting to do, in waste management plans, would help America develop green jobs for its marginalised populations.

On the other hand, thousands of small entrepreneurs have turned to successful recycling businesses, gifting India with one of the world’s highest recycling rates. Consequently, hundreds of thousands of kabadiwalas and wastepickers have livelihoods in the value chain.

Of course this sector needs improved health and safety systems, and more formalisation. If only the US had fostered more such entrepreneurs, it would not have had to export its trash to poorer countries.

The still-surviving practice of re-use is embedded in our cities through the work of cobblers. Their skills help prolong the lives of everyday shoes and bags. Why not enable such repair-based green jobs in the US too?

If the US and India learn from each other’s innovations and practices, citizens will be directly and positively impacted by a unique bilateral relationship.

The writer is the director of the NGO, Chintan

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