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It’s time to clean up the act

Something as simple as segregating garbage at home goes a long way—it promotes the concept of recycling, while also ensuring that our landfills do not get burdened.

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The indefinite strike launched by workers and engineers of Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) last week has revealed the weakness of the citizens in the crucial aspect of garbage segregation. Despite the huge problem of garbage not being lifted—resulting in piles of waste by the roadsides—it at least showed us how miserable we are at segregating garbage right in our homes, the very source at which segregated garbage makes it easy for the civic agencies to systematically dispose it of.

DNA questioned some city dwellers in this regard and found that they were either in the dark over the very concept of ‘garbage segregation’ or had just no time in the mornings to go about it.

This means that when we go about our daily routine assuming that once we have disposed of our domestic (non-segregated) garbage in the mornings, we remain oblivious to the fact that we have actually failed at the very first step. The result is that the lesser-aware pourakarmika compounds the situation by disposing of non-segregated garbage at the already saturated landfills.

Take the case of an accountant working in a cooperative bank in Malleswaram, Mahalakshmi VN, who lives at Malleswaram 8th Cross. Her weekday morning schedules are packed with getting the day started for her two school-going children and her husband, who works as an executive in a multinational company. In the middle of this lies one thing that, almost every day, comes as an afterthought—packing the garbage in a plastic bag and keeping it outside their main door for the building’s housekeeping staff to come and pick it up. Much after all the family members leave, the apartment’s housekeeping staff lift this bag from outside their home and dispose it of in to a large, hard plastic can kept near their building’s gate for BBMP pourakarmikas to come and pick it up. But nowhere in these stages of garbage disposal is there anything called garbage segregation taking place.

“It never occurred to me that it would be important. Besides, when you have a busy schedule, why waste time doing all that (garbage segregation) when the BBMP workers may well do it themselves after picking up the garbage?” Mahalakshmi says.

Kamaleshwar Rao, a middle-aged insurance agent living in an independent house on Subramanyanagar is completely unaware of garbage segregation. “I never knew such a thing existed. Why remove garbage and separate everything before packing and place it in front of my house? Even if I was aware, I don’t think I would be able to do all of that on a daily basis,” he says without realising that all it takes is keeping separate bins for different types of waste.

A cross-section of people that DNA spoke to have the same problem as Mahalakshmi and Rao.

This is why an important part of garbage disposal—segregation at source—never began in a rapidly growing Bangalore, which generates a whopping 4,000 tonnes of garbage every day. People lack the will to go about garbage segregation.

“The BBMP authorities have not taken measures to create awareness among the public on the importance segregating waste at source. If the segregation of waste was done at source, garbage would not have piled up on the streets of Bangalore,” says NS Ramakanth, active member, Solid Waste Management Round Table (SWMRT).

Interestingly, SWMRT had issued guidelines for garbage segregation at source to the BBMP. Although BBMP put these guidelines in the public domain, the civic authorities failed in ensuring that these guidelines were followed.

“The authorities concerned have failed to take measures to create awareness among the public on segregation of waste at source. I am of the opinion that the authorities concerned have to take immediate measures to mitigate garbage-related woes in Bangalore. The BBMP authorities should ensure segregation of waste at source for effective disposal of garbage,” Shiva Shanmugam, president, Federation of Karnataka Chamber of Commerce and Industry (FKCCI).

“More than 90% of Bangaloreans are not even aware of segregation of waste at source. Except a few places in Bangalore, segregation of waste at source is not taking place,” points out environmentalist Suresh Heblikar.

Sandhya Narayan, member, SWMRT, says: “Right now, the thinking is ‘anything I don’t want goes on the roads’. This has to change and markets should think about a facility for in-house wet waste management too. There should be a law even with regard to this and bulk generators should take the onus for the waste they produce.”

What it should be
According to Edugreen, The Energy Research Institute’s (Teri’s) initiative for environment learning among the young, domestic garbage can be segregated into biodegradable and non-biodegradable. Biodegradable waste includes organic waste, like kitchen waste, vegetables, fruits, flowers, leaves from the garden, and paper.

Non-biodegradable waste can be further segregated into recyclable waste (paper, glass, metal, etc), toxic waste (old medicines, paints, chemicals, bulbs, spray cans, fertilizer and pesticide containers, batteries, shoe polish), and soiled waste (hospital waste such as cloth soiled with blood and other fluids. Of these, soiled and toxic wastes have to be disposed of with utmost care.

Edugreen states that household waste should be separated every day into different bags for the different categories of waste such as wet and dry waste, which should be disposed of separately. “One should also keep a bin for toxic wastes such as medicines, batteries, dried paint, old bulbs, and dried shoe polish. Wet waste, which consists of leftover foodstuff, vegetable peels, etc., should be put in a compost pit and the compost could be used as manure in the garden. Dry waste consisting of cans, aluminium foils, plastics, metal, glass, and paper could be recycled,” it states on its website.

Alarm bells
And then it draws up an alarming situation in case we fail at the source level (the household level) in segregating garbage emanating from homes. “If we do not dispose of the waste in a more systematic manner, more than 1,400 sq km of land, which is the size of the city of Delhi, would be required in the country by the year 2047 to dispose it of.”

Initiatives taken, but…
More than 40% by weight and 60% by volume of the total garbage generated in the city is dry waste. These can actually be collected and sold to be recycled subsequently. The wet waste can be converted into manure and used for gardening. It would have taken a household some sour curd and some water to compost.

In fact, it is not that Bangalore has never tried its hand at this, but whenever it was done, it was done erratically. For instance, backyard composting was casually practised in the city’s areas in the 70s and 80s when there was more space and people had gardens attached to their independent houses. With lots of home gardens, the bulk of the waste input material was yard waste. But this practice was strongly discouraged by city health officers in Bangalore then, after such practice invited an increasing number of rodents.

According to United Nations Environment Programme (Division of technology, industry and economics), backyard composting in Bangalore has declined in the past 20 years. But in the past decade, several projects have been initiated for small-scale, neighbourhood-level composting—which is also an element of waste segregation.

In Bangalore, the Waste Wise Project of the Mythri Foundation and the Centre for Environmental Education are both combining worm culture with composting on a small scale on land provided in local parks by the city. Bangalore University also provides advice on worm culture. Pilot research and development projects for small-scale digestion and composting of management of solid waste are also being followed. But this is just a small fraction of the initiative that should have been taken up as far as garbage segregation at source is concerned.

Experts say

‘We can reduce the load of our landfills by 40%’
It comes as no surprise that the fuse keeps getting blown off on the garbage issue, because the city municipality’s solid-waste programme is inadequate and faulty, prone to short circuit.

Segregation at source needs to become a reality through enforcement. It should be supported with back-end collection and storage system. The new door-to-door collection contract needs to move into implementation mode.

This talk of collection of segregated waste and moving dry waste into the dry-waste collection centres is a positive move by the administration to create a recycling mechanism. If this is implemented successfully and supported by the public, we may actually see a solution to the plastic-littering issue. Also, we may find a solution to the huge expenditure on waste disposal.

The recovery of dry waste will reduce the amount of garbage that is sent to landfills by 30%-40%. More importantly, doing so will make it possible to look at various alternatives of composting solutions to deal with the wet waste. This includes decentralised options, which will further reduce the pressure on processing facilities at landfills.

The most important step that the administration needs to take to fix the system is to devise a solid-waste management policy that will address the whole picture, right from segregation at source, source-reduction enforcements down to landfill management. The policy needs to address the infrastructure deficits.

And we, the people, need to take up simple measures in our households, campuses, offices etc. Instead of waiting for a law that will demand us to do these things, we should take the initiatives to fix the problem of garbage, which is plaguing our city. Segregation at source is the least we can do.

By Sandya Narayanan
(The author is a member, Solid Waste Management Round Table, Bengaluru, a group dedicated to promoting garbage segregation at source, along with popularising the concept of Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.)

Making Singaporeans out of Bangaloreans
Can Bangalore become Singapore without Bangaloreans becoming like Singaporeans? It is a cliche that the Bangalorean who visits Singapore fears to throw even a bus-ticket on the ground while the very same Bangalorean flings a putrid melange of rotting, slimy vegetable peel, stinking cooked food remains and soggy plastics merrily at his own street corner, not to speak of broken commodes, torn mattresses and construction debris.

Door-to-door collection of garbage was introduced in this city a decade ago, but many Bangaloreans are still unaware that they are supposed to give their garbage directly to the pourakarmikas with the push-carts or the auto-tippers, only early in the morning. With the strong belief embedded in each household that goddess Lakshmi, or wealth, will not favour a house that has garbage nestling anywhere in the house, their policy is to throw it out the moment it is generated, any time, anyhow and anywhere.

Though they are blessed with the luxury of garbage collection 365 days of the year—it is collected once a week in many developed countries—many demand that there should be collection in the afternoons also.

When many Bangaloreans have not yet learnt to keep their garbage in closed bins in their house even for 24 hours, it is a far cry to make them learn to segregate garbage at least into two categories of ‘wet’ and ‘dry’. In Japan and several other countries, citizens are penalised if they fail to segregate their garbage into at least 10 categories.

While Bangaloreans are the quickest in adopting the latest in lifestyle, they appear to be slow to pick up the lifestyles that characterise genuine civilisation. We seem to take pride and are content to wallow in nostalgia about the Harappans, who had a great system of sanitation 4,000 years ago.

Kathyayini Chamaraj
(The author is executive trustee, CIVIC—a civic activism group.)

‘90% of city’s waste can be recycled, if segregated’
Segregation is not difficult. We do it all the time, except when it comes to garbage. When we cook, wash clothes or do documentation, we segregate.

When mixed up, garbage becomes a nuisance. All we need is two dustbins to separate wet waste (kitchen waste) from dry (paper plastic, glass, e-waste). If it is not segregated, it gets mixed with food waste, it gets soiled and cannot be stored to be disposed of later.

Presently, pourakarmikas put dry waste into one dustbin, which goes to a landfill, such as the one at Mavallipura. Every day, Bangalore produces about 700 tonnes of dry waste, 700 tonnes of plastic waste and about 3,000 tonnes of wet waste. When garbage is not segregated, all of this goes to a landfill. Only mixed waste requires a landfill. When waste is segregated, at least 90% of the waste can be recycled.

The price of our mixed waste going to the landfill is paid by innocent people who then are victims of respiratory diseases and many other diseases. Will we take in mixed waste in our backyards? No! Then why must others pay a price for it?

Why segregation will help the BBMP
When it comes to garbage management, most of the money from the exchequer goes towards transportation. The BBMP spends approximately Rs415 crore on waste management, 60% of which is for transporting garbage to landfills.

What the BBMP should do
● The authorities should insist that people segregate waste. Instead of one vehicle collecting all types of waste, the different types should be collected separately—wet waste every day and dry waste once a week.
● Decentralise waste management by setting up dry-waste collection centres and wet waste composting centres in each ward.

Meenakshi Bharath
(The author is a civic and environment activist and a member of Solid Waste Management Round Table)

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