Cradle to Cradle , a team of students from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), presented a multi-layered framework at the Transform Maharashtra event on Monday, to make the municipal solid waste management system in Mumbai more efficient.
“The sight of [piles of waste seen from the window] while travelling on the local train was upsetting, and is also one of the reasons we took up this issue and tackled it at this level,” said team leader Astha Jhariya.
The students’ presentation revolved around the premise that every local civic body in India collects and disposes of solid waste in a centralised manner, which leads to problems in segregation, and less recycling. “Lack of incentives and awareness for waste segregation at the source is one of the problems,” the presentation said.
The TISS group’s solution is a multi-layered approach to improve efficiency in segregation and collection, and to utilise waste as a resource. “The problem has to be solved by intervention at three layers of municipal solid waste management,” Ms. Jhariya said.
The first layer includes extending producer responsibility, in which accountability of waste packaging is levied on companies that produce and design it. The team also put forward an approach based on incentives, such as municipal tax relaxations and subsidised electricity for waste segregation at the household level. Biogas consumption would also be encouraged.
The second layer focuses on localised waste segregation pockets and waste buying centres, while the third is adopting modern waste-to-energy techniques and waste segregation technology. “The impact is that the waste is no more treated as waste but as a resource, reducing waste dumped in landfills and increasing recycling rates. It also turns the municipal waste management into a revenue-generating model,” Ms. Jhariya said.
The team says these measures will help reduce greenhouse gases and open dumping of garbage on streets, and result in monetary benefits for urban local bodies in terms of less use of land as dump yards, money from conservation of waste to energy, and savings in transportation of waste from source to landfills.
