aRTICLE | Segregating Waste at Source
Delhi needs to own responsibility for its waste
Ashish wakes up to the sound of a van – it is around 6 in the morning and time for duty. He greets Ramin and Sagar, who are there to take government vehicle for collection of waste from around the neighbourhood. Soon, Ramin, Sagar and others will start arriving at the same place with vans filled with waste. They will drop all of it into a little open space created in the government waste compression facility. But, before compression, they would enter into the heap of garbage to segregate wet waste from dry, paper from plastic, polythene from glass, biodegradable wet waste from bio-hazardous waste. He wonders about the use of speakers in those waste collection vans when even after years, people continue to choose to give their waste unsegregated Pooja Upadhyay| Reporter
W
aste is defined as anything that one finds not useful or unwanted. With almost every product that we use, we generate some waste. Naturally, due to rapidly increasing population in urban areas in recent years, cities are witnessing mammoth amount of waste being generated, which is increasingly becoming a challenge for governments and administrations to deal with. Cities, that are supposed to be at the core of development and progress, are currently home to a number of open landfill spots. Two years after the highly acclaimed programme, ‘Swachh Bharat Mission’ was launched by the Government of India, Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEF&CC) notified the new Solid Waste Management Rules (SWM), 2016. It replaced the Municipal Solid Wastes (Management and Handling) Rules, 2000, which had been in place for 16 years. The purposeful SWM, 2016, introduced some much-awaited rules and directions for management of solid waste across the nation.
Segregation at Source
According to World Population Review, the metropolitan area of Delhi has over 32.1 million people and over 3.4
38 June 2022 | www.urbanupdate.in
million housing units. The capital city of India generates around 11,144 tonnes of solid waste daily, as reported by the Government of Delhi in December 2021. The number, however, does not account for the waste collected and disposed by informal waste collectors across the city. The waste collected, dry waste like paper, plastic, and metal are to be sent to factories to recycle them; wet wastes like vegetable peels are to be sent to industries to convert them into manure and energy; and domestic hazardous waste such as sanitary napkins, cleaning agents, and diapers are dealt with separately by incineration; segregation becomes an essential part of handling of waste. The SWM, 2016, mandates the source segregation of waste to channelise the waste to wealth by recovery, reuse and recycling. Waste generators are required to segregate waste into three streamsBiodegradables, Dry, and Domestic Hazardous waste before handing it over to the collector. Once generators mix the three categories of waste and hand it as such to the collectors, the collectors are left with the responsibility of going through the heaps of waste to segregate each item with their bare hands – like Ashish does, at a government waste compression centre in Janakpuri.
