Rethinking urban waste in India: Creating a community paradigm

Abstract

Urban India is likely to face a massive waste disposal problem in the coming years. Traditionally, the problem of waste has been seen simply as one of cleaning and disposing. But a closer look at the current and future scenarios reveals that waste needs to be treated holistically, recognising its natural resource roots as well as its health impacts. Waste has not only tremendous potential for generating livelihoods for the urban poor but also for enriching the earth. Escalating rural-to-urban migration and density of population will make waste management an increasingly difficult issue to handle in the near future, if new management approaches are not developed. A possible new paradigm of waste management is the ‘cradle-to-grave’ approach with responsibility for waste management being shared by many stakeholders, including product manufacturers, consumers and communities, the recycling industry, traders, municipalities and the urban poor. This paradigm is being experimented with by community-based waste management projects in pockets of the city that have been doing door-to-door collection on a service fee, segregating the waste and reducing a substantial amount of waste through recycling and composting. This approach is in stark contrast to the prevalent municipal system of managing waste in a centralised fashion where waste is collected by the municipality and dumped into land-fills. It is estimated that today 80 to 90% of city waste is currently dumped into open land-fill sites.