Let’s talk trash

It is ironical that in a country with more than 1.2 billion people, generating close to 61 million tonnes of trash annually, it took 16 years for the Centre to revise the Solid Waste Management Rules to take cognisance of the changing circumstances in India.

The process of waste management in India, rather waste ‘dumping’ as we should be calling it, has been primitive to say the least: private contractors have been engaged to simply collect and transport waste to designated unscientific landfills, and paid a tipping fee that is solely dependent on the volume of trash dumped every day. And the results are appalling: with a 4 per cent annual growth rate of waste generation in India, and less than 15 per cent of urban India’s waste getting processed in a country 12 times as dense as the US — landfills are not an option.

In the absence of any semblance of urban planning, the burgeoning cities have yielded two major issues: the daily transportation of waste across the length and breadth of a city has led to cost escalations with transportation alone sometimes encompassing a whopping 20 per cent of the overall cost structure, and landfills have been simply unable to hold the expanding volumes every day.

This has lead to frequent fires, as was witnessed recently at Deonar; in fact, a WHO report estimates that 22 diseases, including cancer, asthma and emphysema (a lung disease), are caused in India due to poor solid waste management (SWM) alone.

Apart from the fact that burning trash is the second most prominent cause of greenhouse gas emission in India, and the fact that leachate carries heavy metals and other contaminants to groundwater, resulting in a huge impact on human health and environment, at the very least the condition of the more than 6 million rag-pickers should be cause enough for civic society and government agencies to take up this issue with the urgency it deserves.

With the new policy in place, and the entire ecosystem brimming with informal workers, the simple question that needs to be answered is this: What are the key systemic changes that need to be implemented to institutionalise the change from a waste ‘dumping’ sector into a waste ‘management’ sector? Analysing the value chain starting from waste generation to the final step of waste processing, three key areas come foremost to mind.

Skewed incentive system : While all public goods and services are charged in India, it is astounding that the waste generator in India not only expects the collector to pick up his trash, but expects to be paid for the service as well! With skewed incentives to the resident to generate more trash and to the contractor to earn a tipping fee based purely on tonnage dumped into the landfill, the sorry state of affairs is not surprising.

The SWM 2016 rules attempt to correct this by introducing a collection fee and a penalty to residents who do not segregate their waste into three categories (wet, dry and sanitary).

However, the ultimate success of the scheme lies in the implementation. While it is encouraging that some cities such as Hyderabad have taken up the cause by distributing two bins to residents, the fact that the segregation mechanism has not been incorporated downstream in the collection and transportation systems of the value chain, leaves few incentives for residents to segregate or collectors to follow procedures.

Decentralised operations : Not only do we need highly scientific and automated mechanisms of managing huge volumes of waste, we also need decentralised facilities to make operations manageable and save on transportation costs. While Pune and Bengaluru have attempted to tackle this head-on by recommending zonal management of waste, segregation is still far from perfect and facilities are currently sufficient to manage less than 40 per cent of the daily generation of waste.

Market for by-products : Proper waste management generates useful by-products — organic compost in the case of biodegradable waste and recycled resources in the case of recyclable waste. With heavy subsidies in chemical fertilisers, farmers are disincentivised to move towards organic farming, thus reducing the market for compost drastically. While the new SWM rules attempt to correct the inefficiencies by mandating the department of fertilisers to take up marketing of compost, a lot more needs to be done to encourage farmers to adopt organic farming and save the quality of our farm lands.

What is largely surprising, though, is the apathy towards recycling companies that are today competing at par with industries manufacturing virgin products. Buyers of recycled plastic pellets, for instance, have no incentives to go for sustainable initiatives, unless lucrative cost savings are involved; with misaligned incentives throughout the value chain, to the host of informal middlemen who finally transport recyclables to the recycler at one end, and no financial edge at the revenue side as well, the recycler goes into a cash spiral, adopting unsustainable practices, child labour and no certifications, to cut corners and be solvent.

While the SWM 2016 rules seem like a utopian solution to clean away the crisis that exists today, the devil is in the implementation. Will States readily adopt its recommendations and begin implementation? It is also advisable to remember that just as India is a heterogeneous society, the trash we generate, too, is different and requires focussed research; a simple adaptation of technologies from the West is not always the best answer.

While it is ambitious for the Government to expect citizens to manage their own waste, and for citizens to continue to display the Nimby (not in my backyard) syndrome and expect to be compensated for trashing the planet, it is time civic society and the authorities sat down to chalk out the next steps in implementing this Act. With all the talk about Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, it is expected of us to take concrete measures to transform the sector before it is too late.

The writer is the associate director of Waste Ventures India

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