WHAT DO WE DO WITH ALL THIS TRASH?

 

What do we do with all this trash? With more than 7 billion people consuming, and then disposing of, "stuff" each day, usable space for trash disposal is quickly disappearing. The World Bank estimates that 3 billion people reside within urban areas, producing more than 1.3 billion metric tons of solid waste per year. By 2025 that number is expected to have ballooned to more than 2.2 billion metric tons, forcing governments to task on a garbage problem that many major cities have yet to answer.

 

It is a global problem

It is not a problem of the developing countries only. The Megacities of the world gobble up more water and energy while producing waste astronomically each year. For poor countries, inefficient waste management accelerates the rate of disease as toxins seep into waterways, leading to irreversible environmental pollution.

London churns out too much waste and only 52% goes to recycling. London’s waste disposal companies have increased the recycling rate unburdening the landfill. London’s heavy reliance on primary and secondary industries as the backbone of its economy promotes the consumption of recycled ingredients. The city is blazing the trail in creating a thriving, resilient metro that cuts down waste significantly with a circular economy along with a solid policy framework.

The 7 million perople crammed into Hong Kong's streets produce more than 13,800 metric tons of solid waste a day. That's like tossing an Empire State Building into the waste basket every 27 days. What's worse, of that waste, 3,500 tons-worth comes from scraps of uneaten food, and finding a place to store all of that garbage has proved an insurmountable task. More than 90% of waste is exported for recycling overseas, but that is simply domping poor countries with the waste created by the rich!

One New Yorker dissipates 24 times the electrical energy of a resident in Kolkata, India while spewing 15 times equal solid waste. The city runs a tight ship with aggressive recycling projects that extend outside plastics, paper, and metals to compost food waste. 

Beijing's 20 million plus people produce more than 25,000 tons of garbage a day, a number 4,300 tons beyond what the city can process. The countryside is no better; 40,000 towns and 600,000 villages across the country could not process waste and sewage, leaving more than 300 million tons of waste unprocessed each year.  Chinese government undertook a massive effort to burn trash for energy, constructing hundreds of incinerators to chip away at its trash mountains, but that resulted in large releases of harmful pollutants like dioxin and mercury into the atmosphere.

Manila area produces more than a quarter of all of the garbage in the Philippines, to the tune of nearly 9,000 tons of solid refuse a day. What's worse, only nine of the 16 cities and municipalities that make up the metro Manila area even have a plan to handle all of that waste and 83% og garbage gets collected too.  The trash that does find its way into garbage trucks coalesces into trash cities — towering trash mountains surrounded by shanty towns patrolled by Manila's poorest. Over the years Manila has played host to some of the world's most notorious garbage mountains like Smokey Mountain.

For many years Mexico City's Bordo Poniente held the dubious title of one of the largest landfills in the world. The more than 20 million people of Mexico City's metro area dumped close to 14,000 tons of garbage into the 927 acre site each day. As a result, trash gets dumped everywhere — in rivers, canals, and especially into streets, which are often impassable thanks to the mounds of refuse left behind.

With some 26.7 million people, Jakarta is also one of the world's fastest growing cities. Jakarta produces more than 6,500 tons of waste a day. Most of that waste finds its way to Jakarta's only landfill, Bantar Gebang, a 270 acre trash behemoth that receives 6,250 tons of trash from 800 garbage trucks flowing out of Jakarta each day. The trash clogs waterways during monsoon season, before being sent out into Jakarta Bay and out to sea. 

For hundreds of years the city of Cairo has operated without efficient, government-run trash collection. Instead, for the past 70 years, thousands of trash pickers known as the Zabbaleen have gone door-to-door collecting Cairo's trash for a small fee. The trash-pickers managed to recycle nearly 90 percent of all the garbage that passed through the city, a number that exceeds most Western recycling totals. 

 

The Indian Scenario

India generates 1.7 lakh tons of waste every day. Post Swach Bharat Abhiyan, 90% of the waste is collected and over 54% is processed or treated. Almost 25% of our waste is sent to the sanitary landfills. Now, to this huge man made waste we add the construction and demolition waste, which itself amounts to 15 crore tons a year. If not disposed correctly, which is often the case, it chokes our natural drainage system and cause drains to overflow and monsoon rainwater to cause floods. According to a recent estimate our cities sit atop more than 24 crore tons of legacy waste, spread across 2,400 dumpster, seeping below the surface with every rain, and infecting our groundwater. This leak into our groundwater is called leachate. This is rich in heavy metals, organic pollutants and pathogens contained in the garbage heap. Groundwater near Delhi's Bhalswa landfill has toxic levels of lead and iron and that near Nagpur's Bhandewadi landfill has zinc, copper and cadmium 200% above safe limits. 

New Delhi's tremendous growth has spurned a tremendous growth in refuse, too. The city's solid waste production increased 50 percent over five years, to 9,200 tons of trash a day in 2007, a number that was expected to double by 2024. Three of the four landfills servicing New Delhi are already past capacity, leaving the city starving for additional landfill space. If additional space isn't found these community dumps could spill over into the streets and contribute to a pollution problem that already stretches into the Yamuna river. 

 

Landfills – a necessary evil

Landfills are necessary for the proper disposal of solid waste. They reduce the amount of waste that makes it into the environment, help to prevent disease transmission, and keep communities clean. However, landfills still have significant environmental and social impact. While landfills are a societal necessity, there are practices that can reduce the reliance on landfills and decrease their effects on the biosphere.

Environmental Impact of Landfills

·         The most pressing environmental concern regarding landfills is their release of methane gas from the decomposition of organic waste. Methane is 84 times more effective at absorbing the sun’s heat than carbon dioxide, making it one of the most potent greenhouse gases and a huge contributor to climate change. 

·         Along with methane, landfills also produce carbon dioxide and water vapor, and trace amounts of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and non methane organic compounds. These gases can also contribute to climate change and create smog if left uncontrolled.  

·         The creation of landfills typically means destroying natural habitats for wildlife.

·         While landfills are required to have plastic or clay lining by federal regulation in the U.S in India these rules are openly flounted. This can result in leachate, a liquid produced by landfill sites, contaminating nearby water sources, further damaging ecosystems. 

·         Leachate can contain high levels of ammonia. When ammonia makes its way into ecosystems it is nitrified to produce nitrate. This nitrate can then cause eutrophication, or a lack of oxygen due to increased growth of plant life, in nearby water sources. Eutrophication creates “dead zones” where animals cannot survive due to lack of oxygen. Along with ammonia, leachate contains toxins such as mercury due to the presence of hazardous materials in landfills.

Social Impact of Landfills

·         Emissions from landfills pose a threat to the health of those who live and work around landfills. A study in New York found that there is a 12% increased risk of congenital malformations in children born to families that lived within a mile of a hazardous waste landfill site.

·         Chronic exposure to leachate contaminated water can cause gastroenteritis, neurological diseases and cancer. 

·         Large landfills, on average, decrease the value of the land adjacent to it. Te quality of life suffers in this region.

·         Landfills bring hazards such as odor, smoke, noise, bugs, and water supply contamination.

·         Minority and low-income areas are more likely to find themselves home to landfills and hazardous waste sites. These areas have fewer resources to oppose the placement of these facilities. This makes them an easier target for landfill placement than higher income areas.

How to avoid landfills

·         Recycle! Continuing to recycle will keep plastic and other materials out of the biosphere and put them to further use!

·         Avoid single-use plastics. Check out this article on single-use plastics and how to avoid them.

·         Compost! Landfills lack the oxygen that compostable items need to fully decompose. By putting biodegradable items into the compost instead of the trash, huge amounts of waste can avoid the landfill.

Landfills help to keep our communities clean, but they also pose serious threats to the health of our environment. Working towards living a zero waste lifestyle will help to reduce our reliance on landfills, their impact on the environment, and their impact on human health and well-being

How do we plan ideal waste management?

It has to be a multi-pronged approach. Waste management should follow the waste hierarchy:

1.      Avoid and reduce waste at the source, starting during the design and procurement phases.

2.      Repair and reuse.

3.      Sort and collect waste separating non-hazardous from hazardous waste.

4.      Recycle.

The treatment and processing system for solid waste include window composting, vermicomposting, pit composting, bio-methanation, organic waste convertors, pelletization, material recovery facilities (MRF), waste to energy plants for electricity generation etc. The ‘waste to energy’ plants are not totally safe as they emit harmful particulate matter in far higher concentration than permissible. So, such plants in Okhla in Delhi and in Jaipur and Hyderabad are not very popular with people living nearby.

So, we should have a proper plan of waste management at every step:

Planning and monitoring

Identify the different types of waste produced, evaluate and record their quantity by volume or weight. Draw up a context-based waste management plan, including sorting, collection, transport, storage, and final disposal. Assess and use local capacities like municipal landfill, informal sector, recycling companies, incineration facilities, etc.

Avoid and Reduce

Encourage procurement and programme teams to avoid and reduce waste at early stage of the project. Evaluate the relevance of each purchase. Engage with suppliers and avoid polluting or single-use items and packaging. Encourage re-usable, recycled, locally repairable and recyclable items with a long lifespan.

Repair and Reuse

Identify items that can be repaired and re-used instead of wasted. Support the necessary infrastructure, for example repair shops, tools or internal workshop. Seek spare parts for the repair process.

Sort and collect

Use separate bins and label them to sort and collect waste. Sort, collect and label hazardous waste separately to avoid any risk or contamination. Adapt the sorting to the existing local recycling opportunities (textile, paper, metals, glass, informal and formal sectors etc). Explore opportunities to mutualise collecting and storage with other actors. Bulk waste generators like malls, hotels, hostels, hospitals must compost and segregate on site. Every ward should have its own compost and segregation site and GPS tagged bins and mobile alerts should be used to track garbage collection.

Recycle

Work with local recycling companies and create employment opportunities. Consider influencing and supporting local governments and decision-makers to improve the recycling infrastructure. Recycled products like tiles, road base material, and prefabricated blocks must be popularised.

Treatment and final disposal

Identify and use legally approved local or regional disposal channels (composting, burial, sealing, controlled landfill, incineration…). Visit the site regularly. Establish partnerships (e.g., incineration in cement plants, energy recovery opportunities) and mutualize equipment like compost pits or collaborate with other actors (NGO’s, health structures, local governments, etc.). Incineration must be disintentivised to avoid contaminating the air with particulate matters.

Staff engagement and Sensitization

Raise staff awareness across all departments and involve them in avoiding waste, sorting, reusing, choosing long lifespan items, and reducing packaging.

 

The onus of mindful waste management cannot be the sole responsibility of the government. Public engagement must be strengthened by teaching waste literacy in schools and colleges, awareness campaigns by icons of the society and celebrating champions of zero waste living.