We are all now aware that waste is essentially a resource at wrong place. A resource is considered a waste in mundane world when it loses economic or social value. A land is deemed to be wasteland when it ceases to give an economic output. Since British days, meaning of wasteland is unchanged though many wastelands have been put to several productive activities.
Of various wastes, we are really concerned the most with municipal solid waste that is created by all directly or indirectly and is omnipresent in our country.
Solid waste management (SWM) rules, 2016 is the master document of which plastic waste management PWM) rules is one part. The architects of SWM exhorted all stakeholders to segregate solid waste into three parts -wet, dry and hazardous and also urged the local bodies as well as designated collection agencies to move the waste in segregated fashion to specified centres for further management. This apparently wise prescription has been on paper in virtually all places. Our failure as citizens is the fundamental reason for the sorry state that we are in.
In the rules, Supreme Court has empowered all the local authorities to impose and collect penalty for littering and polluting. The authorities have not carried out costing of services for management of segregated and mixed waste. They have also failed to specify and collect penalties that will compel people to follow rules.
Plastics are a part of our life and have single or multiple uses as consumables and as capital goods or parts thereof. Most of the plastic waste is either dry or easy to dry by all users with little effort.
Government authorities and environmentalists have focused their energy on banning or phasing out single use plastics without an honest and holistic consideration of all factors or options. In the process law makers have focused entire energy on producers of plastic goods or companies using plastic packaging materials giving relative free run to individuals/institutional consumers producing waste and municipal authorities having responsibility for handling waste for a price. Widespread use of of multiplayer pouches or packaging has added to the woes but simple solutions like small bins for collection of such wastes at all the points are not even considered.
All of us have given great thrust to technology based solutions in collection, movement processing and deployment but have failed to immediately support simple entrepreneurial solutions as successfully done in places like Dhoraji of Gujarat.
To sum up, some simple, smart and sensible steps that merit attention are
- Social, behavioural, economic, educational and environmental campaigns to reward segregation as per SWM rules and punish mixing of dry, wet and hazardous wastes
- Creating solutions and business models for converting wet food, kitchen and animal water into biogas and organic fertiliser
- Separation of dry waste into different silos manually or mechanically for value added products of plastics, paper, glass or metals.
- Considering plastic waste more of a logistics issue to devise tools and techniques for efficient management
- Mainstreaming bin culture everywhere to stop littering in public places
- Urging all opinion makers to talk about “litter free India”
- Supporting waste and circular economy businesses through fair, simple, enabling and high priority ecosystem
- Showing local authorities a new revenue source through penalties that are based on end to end costs and externalities relating to pollution (Proper application of “polluter pays principle”)
S B Dangayach
Founder Trustee
Innovative Thought Forum
www.itf-india.com
sbdangayach@gmail.com