Tackling the Challenge of Effective Waste Management

Flawed waste disposal and management system

With an aim to keep urban centres in the country clean, municipal authorities provide the Solid waste management service – a basic a highly essential service. But unfortunately, most of the municipal authorities in the country dump solid waste at a dump yard either within the city or outside the city randomly. Therefore, according to experts India is following a flawed waste disposal and management system.

Ensuring appropriate segmentation and segregation of waste at source and ensuring that the waste goes through different streams of recycling and resource recovery are the most fundamental key to efficient waste management. Therefore, the reduced final residue should be deposited scientifically in sanitary landfills as these are the eventual means of disposal for untreated municipal solid waste, these include the solid wastes that are from waste processing facilities and various other types of inorganic waste that cannot be recycled. However, the costly transportation of MSW to faraway landfill sites is one of the significant major limitations of this method.

Significant employment opportunities

There is a potential of recovering at least 15 percent or 15000 MT of waste that is being generated by the citizens of the country, every day, as per a 2006 report by IIT Kanpur. Not just that the report also stated that this could help in providing significant employment opportunities to more than 500000 rag pickers. Furthermore, the report added that in spite of massive potential in mega cities in this area, there is limited participation from non-profits or community.

One of the solutions to this is the installation of waste-to-compost and bio-methanation plants. These plants would reduce the load of landfill sites to a larger extent. While the biodegradable component of the country’s solid waste is estimated presently at a little over 50 percent the Bio-methanation serves as a solution to this. Bio-methanation is used for processing biodegradable that presents not only the occupational but also the environmental health threats. These threats include toxic smoke emitted through recycling processes.

Using waste as co-fuel or co-raw material in the manufacturing processes

What has resulted in the increase of Public-Private Partnership models in waste management and has open doors for doing business in waste management is the concept of the common waste treatment facility being largely promoted and accepted. This is majorly because of the use of waste as a resource by using it as either a co-fuel or co-raw material in the manufacturing processes.

The garbage management in cities should be reinvented in order to easily process the waste since it would reduce landfills and provide adequate provisioning in processing and recycling. In order to accomplish this, both the households as well the institutions must segregate the waste at the source since it can be managed efficiently as a resource, later.