ABSTRACT:

 Recycling is a flourishing business in India’s informal sector, retrieving 10-15% of urban wastes and employing millions in a sometimes illicit, twilight activity.  Recycling won recent legitimacy through a Public Interest Litigation, with  recommendations of a Supreme Court Committee on Urban Solid Waste Management and matching new laws for waste management, which should slowly upgrade recycling technologies.  

A totally-voluntary Ecomark scheme for Eco-labelling  in 14 major industry sectors has had almost no takers since 1992.  New legislation may soon be framed to promote product stewardship, producer responsibility and waste minimization in India, similar to such legislation elsewhere.

1.   Composting of bio-degradables

For millennia, the fabled wealth and prosperity of ancient India, which was then even more agrarian than today, came from sustainable practices like composting and the return of nutrients to the soil. Even today in rural India, in backyard middens or roadside pits, domestic wastes not fed to animals are added to stable-straw and cowdung, and applied to the fields once a year. Until 10-15 years ago, most city waste was carted to farms and informally composted too.  The advent of plastics, especially thin-film carry-bags that block  germination and the entry of rain-water into the soil, has been a major deterrent to rural use of urban waste. This now ends up in open dumps outside cities and towns.

The 1994 epidemic in Surat, caused by garbage blocking drains and flooding out rats, riveted the country’s attention to the ill-effects of bad waste-management.  It turned to the Excel-pioneered  process of using biocultures to accelerate composting of mixed urban wastes in aerobic wind-rows, reducing it in 60 days to a matured free-flowing mass with 60% of its original volume, from which mechanical sieves easily removes non-biodegradables. This post-compost sorting of mixed garbage has been the key to successful handling of Indian wastes. 

2.  Composting made mandatory

In 1996 a PIL (Public Interest Litigation, WP 888/96) was filed in the Supreme Court of India, demanding hygienic and eco-friendly waste-management in India’s 300 Class 1 Cities with over 100,000 population, and provision of adequate sites for waste-processing and disposal. A Court-appointed Committee in 1999 recommended source-separation of “wet” biodegradable waste and “dry” recyclables, with daily doorstep collection of “wet” waste for composting as the method of choice, and “dry” waste left to the informal sector.  The Report  also addressed a host of administrative, fiscal and legal issues related to making cities cleaner.

This led to Notification by India’s Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) of the matching “Municipal Solid Waste (Management & Handling) Rules 2000”, [MSW Rules] which lay down a timetable for acquiring land for waste-processing and setting up of compost plants.  A major obstacle now is  NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) opposition to the setting up of compost plants by peri-urban communities who fear land-value erosion and  the possibility of open-dumping creeping into their neighbourhoods.

3   Recycling given legal backing

Indians have a remarkably small ecological footprint compared to citizens in advanced countries.  Non-biodegradable waste in large Indian cities averages just 50 – 100 gm per capita per day, compared to 1-2 kg in the West.  This is now often disparaged as “backwardness” or under-development, because of a failure to recognise and appreciate the inherently frugal and conservationist ethos of those who repair and use appliances and cars for years, hand down  clothing to relatives or servants, waste no food, or re-use paper and string.  

Waste-picking is a well-established urban-survival tactic in India’s mega-cities that act as magnets for the poorest, and recycling is a flourishing business in the informal sector in India.  It supports upto 0.5 % of the population in million-plus cities, and saves a city 10-15% of its total waste-management costs through reduction in waste volumes handled.  Yet, because of public suspicion and attitudes, waste-collectors are despised, harassed and marginalized. Doorstep collection of recyclable waste is only now attracting a few service providers in commercial areas. Small-scale cottage-industry recycling is still a mostly-illicit twilight activity; recyclers often operate behind closed  windows and doors and avoid registration.  

Only recently has recycling won formal legitimacy in India through the MSW Rules, which direct municipalities to “promote recycling or reuse of segregated materials” and “ensure community participation in waste segregation”.  This should improve the status and working conditions in this sector and upgrade recycling technologies.  India today presents a golden opportunity for suppliers of all types of simple low-cost recycling processes and equipment.

The menace of plastics

India’s landscapes are littered with plastic.  Wind-blown thin-film carry-bags are seen everywhere, blighting heritage areas, causing floods because of blocked drains and slowly killing cattle that forage in the streets to eat garbage-filled bags that remain undigested.  Open dumps put nearby land out of cultivation as soils get layered with wind-blown plastic and become infertile.  

Aquatic life, fishery and coastal tourism is threatened.  Since a decade there has been a rising outcry from the littering public that demands action, any action. Many citizens desire a total ban on their use, but not all of them are ready to stop their own use of the thin carry-bags that are now automatically and freely given with even the smallest purchase.  The pro-plastic lobby claims that strong light-weight plastics  are eco-friendly, saving freight and reducing food spoilage.  They claim the solution is not a ban on use, but on careless disposal.  Since this involves enormous changes in public habits, attempts have been made to totally ban the use and sale of thin plastic carry-bags.  Results vary :  some have good initial successes, which fade with time.  Goa had a spectacular clean-up campaign that left the organizers with two mountains of collected and unwanted plastic and no change at all in littering habits thereafter.