“With planned waste management based on people’s participation, governments can turn garbage into a gold mine,” waste management expert Vellore C. Srinivasan said here on Friday.
“Making cities free of garbage is a headache for most city governments in the country. With a little effort, garbage can be changed into a source of job creation and endless resources,” he said.
According to him, segregated and processed garbage yielded over 150 types of recyclable materials and over 200 byproducts that had an assured market. The expert from the NGO, Indian Green Service, was speaking on the benefits of zero waste management to NGOs, citizens groups, urban local body members and officials.
Mr. Srinivasan said that the success of a waste management programme hinged on multiple levels of segregation at home and at the processing centre. Identifying different types of garbage and using distinct processing techniques to clean, treat and sell them, training workers and officials and creating awareness among residents to work with the government were the only challenges, he said.
Mr. Srinivasan, who was featured on Amir Khan’s TV show ‘Satyameva Jayate’, prefers to call it solid and liquid resource management (SLRM). “Calling it garbage or waste creates a mental block in most of us who don’t want to take it up later. Hence there is a need to change the vocabulary,” he said. Mr. Srinivasan said that Vellore town had evolved a system of waste management that used age old techniques like composting and targeted processing. The city had eliminated roadside dust bins and was using self-help groups to collect segregated waste from every family. Various processing plants create products like fertilizer, natural gas, plastic and metal which were always in demand, he said. This had come to be known as the Vellore technique and was now followed by several cities, Mr. Srinivasan said.
He gave examples of cities like Vellore, Coimbatore, Jodhpur and Ambapuri that had successfully adopted the SLRM technique.
He showed videos of how Mysuru City Corporation was using vegetable waste to feed cows that produced compost, fish market waste fed the ducks that aerated waste waters and how chicken and fish ate away larvae and maggots and completed the cycle.
“Bidar city has 45,000 houses and 4,000 shops and offices. If it can properly segregate and process the garbage that it produces on a daily basis, the city municipal council can earn up to Rs. 40 lakh a month from recycling and reuse alone,” Mr. Srinivasan said. He said that a city like Bengaluru could earn over Rs. 1,500 crore a year from garbage, rather than spending similar amounts on garbage disposal, he said.
