PROBLEM: Waste management in Hayatabad township Peshawar
By: Muhammad Izaz
Tags: Design Thinking, Problem Solving, Amal Fellowship

Today I am going to share an experience regarding “problem-solving through design thinking”. I was taking this online course about problem-solving through design thinking and I had to submit my project work by identifying a problem. I live in Hayatabad Peshawar and it's under the control of “Peshawar development authority” (PDA), I always thought about the waste management problem in Peshawar but as Hayatabad Peshawar is a township and waste management seemed flawless here because PDA has Municipal solid waste management which takes care of solid waste and collects waste from door-to-door in the pretty much-organized way. So I thought, waste is not a problem here after all.

During the course, I came to know the steps behind problem-solving through design thinking and it involved observing a problem, identifying and acknowledging it. At this point, I thought about this waste problem with more observation and asked a question from myself, “what do they do with the waste they collect? To find the answer I started to research about it and came to know that they dump all this solid waste in a dumping facility at phase-7 Hayatabad. According to the case study “Municipal Solid Waste Management Crises in the Developing Countries: A Case Study of Peshawar City”, around 90 tons of MSW is dumped in this facility on a daily basis.

Now that seems to be an alarming problem for me. I will state this as a major problem because dumping waste at a local facility has many negative impacts on the people living nearby. The foul smell is unbearable, the beautification of that nearby area is compromised, it can give rise to many health issues and can turn out to be a habitat for micro-organism that play role in spreading different type of diseases.

The second major problem is the adverse effect on the environment. It can lead to soil degradation and also releases different kinds of gases upon break-down that has substantial effects on the atmosphere.

Figure 1:Soil Stock for spreading over the thrown batch of the MSW

Figure 2:Covered Dumping Pits already reached a ground level

As a resident of Hayatabad Peshawar, I am also concerned with this problem but the people who are most affected by this problem are people who live nearby the dumping sites. Those people are more affected by the societal negative impacts of this method of waste management because of the foul smell and health concerns. But if we look at the problem in-depth, every person in Peshawar and specifical residents of Hayatabad are indirectly affected by the soil degradation and effects on the atmosphere.

This activity and thinking process has a very good impact on the way I tackle problems, sometimes there are problems all over around us but due to the lack of observation and empathy with the people concerned, we overlook the problem and fail to identify and acknowledge it. Design thinking is a process that we cannot adopt until we start practicing it and through this experience, I realize that we have to tackle any problem through these steps and not by getting panicked.