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Waste Management-Twin cities with two bins
Highlights
Effective outcomes are often resultant of due diligence in planning and management. Recently Telangana Government with the help of its local civic body Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) issued an order to distribute two garbage bins to the residents of twin cities.
Effective outcomes are often resultant of due diligence in planning and management. Recently Telangana Government with the help of its local civic body Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) issued an order to distribute 'two garbage bins' to the residents of twin cities.
This policy aims towards segregation of solid and wet waste at household level. It symbolically represents 'Swachh Hyderabad Mission' (emerged out of the parent initiative 'Swachh Bharat Mission'). Garbage segregation is the appropriate first step in any waste management system. Better late than never, this policy is a great counterbalance when compared to dumping huge chunk of mixed garbage on a plane piece of land.
Hyderabad on a daily basis generates tones of domestic household waste. For an urban resident, once the garbage leaves their home it is not their problem. Hence, the pivotal question 'where the garbage goes?' is a far distant thought to contemplate upon. If there was a way to spread the information that shows the journey of Hyderabad's garbage from household bins to the massive dumping grounds where they end up. That would perhaps reveal our laziness and zero mindfulness towards reducing consequences through a simple idea of in-house waste segregation.
Segregating household waste solves a major problem that can be hazardous for waste-disposal workers. The nature of their job and our unprepared waste disposal system puts their health on a back seat and exposes them to major infectious and chronic diseases. These men and women sort garbage with their bare hands amidst the strong unendurable stink. Large part of their daily work goes behind segregating waste. Keeping in mind, the amount of attention required to segregate our waste is stomach-churning. Adding a bit more to it, workers are not even provided with gloves, masks and boots, even if they are given gloves (in rare cases), many refuse to use them owing to ease of work.
Household waste can be broadly divided into two categories- dry waste and wet waste, so that dry can be recycled and wet can be composted into organic fertilizers, biogas etc. The whole idea behind distributing two dustbins to each household is the broad idea of waste management. Waste transportation is an important logistic activity, the cost incurred behind multiple disposal trips will reduce immensely once this policy is fully implemented. It will also reduce the amount of waste that reaches dumping yards which will further reduce the emission of greenhouse gases.
Last but not the least, from humanistic perspective, workers will have less raw-decayed-mixture of waste to deal with. The existing method of waste disposal has several health as well as environmental hazards. The very idea behind un-segregated waste has a long trail of problems, hence it is never too late to implement a strategy that reduces economic cost without creating any threat to the ecosystem.
-Amit Sengupta
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