India is undergoing a phase of rapid, semi-planned urbanisation accompanied by a steady material growth; according to the World Bank India it is expected to add nearly 250 million people to its urban population by 2025 and amidst the global economic slump the country’s GDP is projected to grow at a robust 7% in FY 2024-25.
As our cities grow, so does the waste they generate. However, this growth is not matched by a corresponding growth in our waste management infrastructure - The Central Pollution Control Board report of 2020 – 21 reports that only 50% of the 160,000 Tonnes Per Day of solid waste generated is treated, with close to one-fifth reaching landfills. Non-government reports paint a bleaker picture with figures reporting that up to 70% of the waste reaches landfills, river bodies and forests.
Emerging Cities: Unprepared for the Future?
While bigger cities have access to the financial, human and technological resources to plan waste management, smaller towns and cities struggle to plan and execute effective solid waste management strategies. There are instances of rich mid and small sized Urban Local Bodies – Mysore, Surat, Leh etc. which consistently perform admirably in Annual Cleanliness Surveys (Swacch Survekshan) – but such cases are outliers rather than the norm. Our assessment of working in 10 small towns across India, Nepal and Bangladesh exhibits that the towns lack the technical and financial capacity to consistently operate solid waste management infrastructure that exists.
On the Swacch Bharat Mission Dashboard, 2,300 out of the 2,400 landfills in India are in small towns and cities (< 1 million population) implying that almost half of India’s small towns have an unscientific dumpsite – which points to systemic dysfunction of our solid waste management infrastructure.
The Hidden Potential of Informal Workers in Recycling - A Partial Solution
We rely substantially on the availability of informal sanitation worker groups to tackle a major portion of the solid waste challenge. The Centre for Science and Environment estimates that there are more than 1.5 million informal sanitation workers in India and that 30–60 percent of all paper and cardboard, 50–80 percent of all plastic and nearly 100 percent of all glass bottles manufactured in India are recycled with the interventions of the informal sector in India.
For emerging towns, which often lack the technical and financial resources to setup and effectively operate Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs) integration of the informal workers network can help divert 20-30 percent of the city’s waste from landfills to productive recycling usage.
The City of Leh on-boarded local junk dealers and scrap workers to work at the landfill, MRF and other waste accumulation sites in the city to extract gainful solid waste fractions. This helped the city, which lacked the human resource to manage waste, to reduce its waste burden and generate some operational revenue.
Data - The Catalyst for Informed Decision Making
Majority of the emerging cities lack accurate data on the quality and quantity of waste flows – which makes it difficult to devise effective solid waste management strategies. BORDA, along with its partner TIDE NGO supported the cities of Leh, Chintamani, Chikkaballapura and Kargil map its waste flows through a WASTE FLOW DIAGRAM.
While mapping the data for Chikkaballapura, the town officials realised that the city was sending about 300kgs of valuable dry waste to the landfill daily. To remedy this issue – they on-boarded a local scrap dealer, Ali, to segregate commercial waste before it went to the landfill. This generated a revenue of about INR 15,000 a month for the Urban Local Body while Ali was able to employ to scrap dealers to work for him. This is a great example of a city using data for local recycling operations.
Clustering Waste Flows for Scale
The quantum of waste generation from small emerging cities is small – a town of 100,000 residents will roughly generate about 30 tons per day of municipal waste. Not enough to drive consistently profitable recycling operations.
It is imperative therefore to look at recycling at scale – at the district or city-cluster level.
District and state administrations can support this process by entering into state/ district-level licensing agreements for waste aggregation and off-take. This can also enable EPR activities to flow into smaller cities.
Building Systems for Improved Waste Management
The solid waste management challenge for emerging cities is just beginning. Though the situation is grave the problem is still nascent and can be tackled by building efficient systems – capacity building to ensure source segregation, integrating informal workers to improve recycling rates, clustering for waste flows etc. It is imperative that these systems be built into the governance framework for long-term sustainability and to be able to drive improved sanitation outcomes.