Your waste is not out of your sight and therefore, out of your life.
By: Neha Khandelwal
Tags: Systems Thinking, Waste Management, Waste, Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, Social Movements

It is there in your water, in the air your breathe, in the food you eat.

I am a regular Indian, who got concerned about plastic. You may ask Why ?

Thanks to Modiji who gave me my fav line to use with people who litter, “Kya aapne sawatch bharat ka naam suna hai?” It saved me from having usually a very uncomfortable conversation. What it didn’t save me was from noticing, where are the dustbins, as pointed out by a couple who threw the soiled diaper out the the train window of a Udupi bound train. They shouldn’t be expected to carry the diaper in their bag like the toffee wrappers I carried in my pockets.

Which leads me to why I am writing this article.Recently people were casually sitting around in this space in Delhi and eating food while I was thinking about hygiene. Yeah, I am judgmental.

Image description: Somewhere in Vivek Vihar Market covered with plastic and forgotten, broken table. The electric box rusted, covered with something that looks like pee ?

The above image is of somewhere in Vivek Vihar Market covered with plastic and there is also a forgotten, broken table. The electric box which is rusted, covered with something that looks like pee mixed with spit that is thrown out after eating paan/supari. Typical India.

My husband asks me why do I care so much about the gand, गन्द a hindi term for kachra/garbage or something that is dirty. Afterall, You are an Indian.

I tell him about the mountain of garbage I see whenever I go from Gurgaon to Faridabad. From a road ironically called the pahadi raasta, the mountain road. It was a hilly area before it became a space with a mountain of garbage.

The space is called Bandhwari landfill and the villages around it are slowly dying.

L ocals estimate that there have been at least 100 cancer-related deaths in the region since 2013, after a fire mishap left the waste management plant at the Bandhwari landfill defunct.

Did you know that the Bandhwari landfill site is a dumping ground for both Faridabad and Gurgaon. 1200 tonnes of waste everyday. Read here to understand how it goes into your water and air.

1200 tonnes of this Source

It’s a mix of toxic waste like medical waste, biomedical waste like diapers, sanitary pads, and my favourite single-use plastic.Things you use casually everyday without a second thought. Zero waste life is not possible. It will mean not ordering in food from most of the places, making cleaning products at home, hunting local shops which sell open grains, making my own dahi and other things I don’t have time for.

Going back to the landfills.These landfills are usually towards the outskirts of the cities. You know the outskirts of Delhi where Delhi government moved all the urban slums once upon a time to make a “cleaner” looking Delhi. While working in these slums you will notice the residents of villages around these sites living alongside these garbage mountains. Their kids playing in the garbage.

Dystopian environmental enthusiasts may say, that an Urban flood, when garbage covers the entire land is not far away.

Image description: Garbage from both left and right overflowing towards the city buildings in the middle

It becomes closer to the truth when you see the aftermath of floods, a natural disaster in Kerala.

Kerala street covered with plastic waste during floods

Btw I haven’t talked about Liquid waste or Sewage at all. (Fun Fact: Delhi’s Waste Is Responsible For Killing All Aquatic Life In Yamuna River) I have been just focussed on the solid waste. The conversation about how 90% of lakes in Bangalore are contaminated with sewage and how it effects the people who drink tap water is a long one. I haven’t talked about the people who are hired on contractual basis and open up your garbage wrapped in black packet to segregate it into two parts with their bare hands.

My local waste collection guy. He keeps on changing. This is the 4th one. What is common is that fact that they have no protective gear. They are collecting this waste to dump it in a smaller truck which will go dump it into a bigger truck which will go dump this in a landfill. Update: Yesterday there was a young boy all of 14yrs who came to pick the garbage. This was the 5th one.

When the system is so complicated where do you begin ? I decided to begin from home and then quickly stopped.

Learnings from trying to take individual responsibility

I moved from Bangalore to Faridabad, NCR in May 2019. I was enraged to find that there was no waste segregation there. You see, I separated my waste in Bangalore, I felt good doing it. I have researched about Bangalore’s solid waste ecosystem and I believed in the outcome. So I decided to figure out why it’s not happening in my hometown of Faridabad.

Found out that Ecogreen is a company appointed by the Haryana state government to provide a holistic waste management solution.

What they are doing instead: subcontracting to other smaller contractors whose business model depends on tonnage of waste collected and not how the waste is managed. Hmm.

Even if I get my residential sector to segregate waste, which I know they were eager to, what’s the point if there are no systems in place to complete the cycle of waste management ? I did not want to start an Ngo.

I found out from a fellow to the chief minister of Haryana how in order to badger Ecogreen to provide services as promised, the state government withheld their payments. They soon found out it’s not an effective tactic. That’s when I realised maybe this is the reason why so many of those contractual employees who manage our waste don’t get paid for months. Another conversation about Rights.

I tried to connect with NGO’s to fill the gaps of this system. Found an organisation to do awareness about waste segregation in the sector. But then I talked to someone who has been doing this for 6 years in another locality in my city. She says, the bigger struggle is with the other kind of waste. Even if you do organic waste composting in the locality, recycling electrical, plastic, bio-medical waste wasn’t possible as there were no NGOs providing this service.

I realised that if I went the same path, I will still not be able to move the system in my lifetime.

What organisations are doing ?

The organisations are doing what the government should be working on. The system is huge and complicated. From waste generation, to waste segregation, to support provided to waste collectors, to making people aware, to recycling and responsibly disposing the waste, there are n number of things. There are many responsible sources if You want to delve deeper.

There are various organisations like Saahas in Bangalore, Chintan in Delhi, Daily Dump & many other dedicated organisations that are working in various ways to managing our waste and changing the way stakeholders engage with the system itself. Saahas trains Bangalore Municipal corporation employees and implements a holistic process of managing solid waste by segregation & recycling. It also supports Decentralised waste management systems which are led by the community. They have generated enough knowledge bank for us to hand it over to the Government of India. Just listen to Greta Thunberg, a kid talking about environment about how it is too late and too little.