Waste pickers and organisations running the 182 dry waste collection centres (DWCC) in the city will soon collect dry waste from your doorstep twice a week — instead of garbage collectors collecting both wet and dry waste now.
Henceforth, the person who collects garbage from your house will collect only wet waste and personnel from the DWCC will collect dry waste in a separate vehicle.
The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) is now drawing up MoUs with all those handling the 182 DWCCs — most of them run by former ragpickers — for door-to-door collection.
The programme will run for four months as a trial and will be continued based on its success, Sarfaraz Khan, Joint Commissioner, Solid Waste Management, BBMP, has said.
Addressing complaints
With this move, the civic body hopes to address the growing number of complaints from citizens that even though they segregate dry and wet waste at home, collectors eventually mix them.
Though segregation at source was made mandatory from February 1, it has met with little success.
The new system ensures mutually exclusive streams of collection for dry and wet wastes. “This will force citizens to segregate waste at source,” said civic official.
The move is expected to leverage value to the bulk of dry waste generated each day.
Of the estimated 4,000 tonne waste generated a day in the city, at least 40% (1,600 tonne a day) is dry waste.
However, studies show that DWCCs are running at less than an average 35% efficiency. Against an estimated 1,600 tonne a day of dry waste generated in the city, not even 500 tonne a day reach the DWCC stream.
Nalini Shekhar of Hasiru Dala, an NGO that supports over 33 DWCCs, said door-to-door collection was a big incentive to the DWCCs as they will finally be able to collect most of the dry waste of which not even a fraction is presently reaching the centres.
On an average, a ward has over 14,000 households divided into blocks of 1,750 households for dry waste collection.
For each such block, the DWCC will have to rope in a vehicle for which the civic body will pay ₹42,500 a month — for rent, driver and cleaner expenses.
Segregation
The waste pickers will later segregate dry waste collected into paper, cardboard, bottles, glass, and plastic and sell them for recycling.
Ms. Shekhar said most of the waste pickers running the DWCCs were ready to invest money and have taken capital assistance to work on the new model.
Will this spell death knell for unorganised sector?
The inefficiency of dry waste collection centres (DWCCs) in collection of dry waste has spurned a vibrant unorganised sector comprising paper traders and ragpickers. Will door-to-door collection by DWCCs spell a death knell for this unorganised sector is the question many activists have raised.
Ramprasad, a solid waste management expert, said while the BBMP’s move will have merit, it will award a monopoly to DWCCs, thereby adversely affecting the unorganised sector.
As DWCC collectors also deal with scrap paper, they are likely to purchase that from the doorstep — a convenience for the residents — killing a large sector, he argued.
However, Nalini Shekhar of Hasiru Dala, which also works with ragpickers, said, “We cannot argue that ragpickers need to be left unorganised. We want the next generation to choose this profession and not be forced into it by fate,” she said.
However, Sarfaraz Khan, Joint Commissioner, SWM, BBMP, said the DWCC’s doorstep collection will expand the sector and bring thousands of waste pickers into the organised sector.
