Mission Swachch Bharat: Move towards zero waste

Two months ago, Maharashtra environment secretary RA Rajeev lamented at a workshop that no Chief Minister or Prime Minister had ever spoken of a litter-free country. As if on cue, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has spoken up. And how.

Modi is the first national-level politician to take up cleanliness as a national priority. He raised the issue first in his Independence Day address, then on Teacher’s Day, in Bangalore and even in the US. He will launch Mission Swachch Bharat on October 2, the birth anniversary of a person many believe is anathema to Modi. 

Never before has such stature been enjoyed by the cause of cleanliness and sanitation -- issues that are joined at the hip and translate into health and life at the front end. Sweeping has always been a lowly chore in India, steadfastly so because of its unattractiveness as a vote-getting cause.

The solid waste problem in India is immense. Given our resilient yen for littering and high tolerance for squalor, Modi’s emphatic focus on garbage removal is not just necessary but essential. If we do manage to achieve the seemingly impossible target of garbage clearance at the street and the doorstep, we would have covered the first -- and biggest in terms of its scale -- stage of the waste conundrum.

There is much more to waste management than collection and dumping. Without going into the different types of waste or their hazard potential, the obvious steps in an integrated approach towards a more civilised and sustainable waste disposal system are reduction of waste, segregation of waste at source, local composting, treatment, recycling and re-use. Only the waste left over at the end of this chain should be incinerated, with an energy conversion component built in if feasible. Landfilling should be the absolute last option for non-recoverable waste, and when inevitable, it should be done in a sanitary way, not in open landfills. Incidentally, Japan has an island, Odaiba, constructed over a landfill site in Tokyo Bay.

In India, waste management has not evolved as a sector. A PIL by Almitra Patel against open dumping of waste in 1996 led to the drafting of rules by a Supreme Court-appointed committee to provide a legal framework for a range of activities such as generation, storage, collection, transportations, processing and disposal into a sanitary landfill, etc. 

A detailed report by a technical advisory group set up by the government dwells on processing and disposal, cost-effective solutions, etc. Yet, most efforts at composting and treatment are individual and informal. India has waste-to-energy plants and recycling factories, many of which recycle waste from countries like Nepal and Bhutan. We also have some exemplary showcases. Suryapet in Telangana is India’s first waste-complaint city with zero garbage. Namakkal, a district town in Tamil Nadu, has privatised its waste management systems, enforces door-to-door collection with source segregation, vermi-composting of organic garbage and sale of recyclables. But what is needed is a macro overhaul enhancing, integrating, and streamlining all the cogs in the wheel.

To work our way up from segregation to re-use, an architectural framework comprising the government/local bodies, private sector and/or public-private partnership, NGOs and public needs to be put in place. Local municipalities can coerce compliance through a string of laws and levies on the creation and collection of waste such as a landfill tax, capping per capita waste generation, penalising certain types of inorganic waste.

Countries not just in the developed West but even in our neighbourhood have seamlessly moved to a system of waste reduction. Dhaka slums have taken to open-air barrel composting and collect $20 per ton carbon credits. Singapore, which faces land scarcity like most of urban India, has a recycling rate of over 60 %. In particular, its near-complete recycling of construction debris holds out hope for a rapidly urbanising country like ours.

Singapore’s charges for waste disposal disincentivise generation by construction companies.

European Union countries have done better than most in this area. The European waste hierarchy has five steps: prevention, reuse, recycle, energy recovery and disposal. Its directives include the principles of ‘polluter pays’ and ‘extended producer responsibility’.

Sweden, which came together as a nation for waste management, sees waste as a resource and not as a problem. Almost half of its waste goes into incineration with energy recovery. A world leader in food waste treatment, its food waste is separated and treated to recover biogas and bio-fertiliser. Sweden’s landfilling shrunk from 62 % in 1975 to just 1% a year ago. Measures such as landfill tax, ban on dumping combustible and organic waste, energy tax to make waste-derived energy more attractive, and lowering of taxes on use of bio-fuels drove the change.

On the other hand, the Flemish region of Belgium, Flanders, discourages incineration except for waste that cannot be controlled or prevented. It has one of the best programmes of waste mitigation and recycling. It recycles and re-uses three-fourths of its household waste while discouraging incineration. From about five decades ago when open dumping was common, it has closed most dumping sites. 

Landfill and incineration restrictions were introduced in 1998. Half of its population today is into home composting. The Flanders waste management agency, OVAM, has developed a tool, Ecolizer, to help an enterpreneur work out the environmental burden of a product from design, make, processing, energy use, transport and recycling, thereby enabling a suitable change in its design. The cost of recycling is integrated into the product price. 
Not technology or economy but a mix of factors woven into the administrative vision, coupled with public will, can deliver the progression to zero waste.

Modi has taken the first giant step by lending his considerable weight to the issue. It’s a good beginning. On our part, we will have to retrain ourselves to understand that waste management is not the exclusive domain of civic authorities. We are equal stakeholders and should do what we can right away -- reduce, segregate, re-use and compost at home.

The author is a senior journalist based in Mumbai