Staying in a rural area, away from civic amenities, many aspects of life are brought into sharper focus. Waste and rubbish are major ones. There is no daily or weekly collector to remove it all from your door. (Nothing like having all your rubbish at home to concentrate and encourage thoughtful and cautious use, promoting zero waste.) It hit us early: our first task was trying to keep the Sarai’s building site clean of non-biodegradable waste. Gutka packets would appear on every path, the sheen of their tiny squares seemed to glisten under every blade of grass.

How I longed for those pre-packaging days of the India I arrived in. So hard to believe now, but 35 years ago when I first made the Indian subcontinent my home, the plastic bag was not the ubiquitous creature it is today — the occasional duty free or M&S bag I brought were sought- after items that were used carefully and many times over both by myself and others. Packaging was mainly paper, recycled, used school exercise books and such, and the iniquities of plastic and other petroleum-based packaging was as yet hardly known.

In the early ’80s, I was working in Manas, a beautiful national park of Assam, on the border of Bhutan. On a winter weekend up to 100 busloads of visitors would drive through the reserve to Mothanguri to picnic by the river. Many baulked at such huge crowds invading a precious biodiversity area but the enlightened park director — a legend in his time — Sanjay Deb Roy, argued that the damage done was minimal compared to the benefit of having such a large constituency of park supporters.

Certainly, the picnic damage was indeed minimal: their discarded leaf plates and cooked meal remains were food for the birds or composted quickly. There were no empty tetrapak drink cartons, no plastic or aluminium packets of salty snacks. Even biscuits came in waxed paper not plastic wrappers. Economic growth brings an exponential increase in rubbish. How different a busload of lunch debris might look now.

In a couple of decades, our waste has changed drastically, but we still seem to behave as if it were the same bio-degradable material that will disappear with the monsoon. But it is not so — now visible garbage piles line every village and town, so much of it plastic, and it merely grows and never diminishes. It poses a serious threat to our and the livestock’s health. It’s also, in all likelihood, causing long-term pollution of toxins in the soil and waterways; in this way also contaminating our food chain.

While aiming for zero waste, we can improve the situation by immediately adjusting our habits in line with our changed rubbish. The government has prescribed the rules and regulations for this; we need to put them into practise. Our duty as citizens is to segregate our household waste. Even living in flats without gardens we can compost our bio-degradable waste odourlessly by using effective microorganisms.

In India as much as 50 per cent of the municipal solid waste consists of biodegradable items. If these are kept separate from the rest, they can be safely used for energy, for cooking and/or for compost, while the rest is cleaner and can be recycled or reused more easily. Imagine the saving to our landfills and the potential for cleaner energy.

(Joanna Van Gruisen is a wildlife photographer conservationist hotelier based near Panna Tiger Reserve.)

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