Keeping garbage close can be useful. A project in Katraj, Pune’s largest ward, shows how; and it will soon apply across the city.
In Pune, garbage is becoming political. Every day, 3.5 million Punekars generate 2,600 tonnes of waste. Late last month, people from the villages next to the two major landfill sites, sick of the filth in their own back yard, decided to prevent garbage trucks from bringing in waste to dump.
The blockade was lifted after five days, but by then uncollected garbage had piled up around the city. Bins overflowed, roadsides stank, and drains were choking. With municipal elections around the corner, corporators were worried. The short-term solution was for the ruling NCP to promise that the demands of the villagers would be met.
A long-term solution still evades Pune. But a beginning has been made in Katraj, the largest of the city’s 144 wards. There, three organisations — Janwani, the social wing of the Mahratta Chamber of Commerce, Industries and Agriculture; SWaCH (Solid Waste Collection and Handling), a cooperative of workers who collect waste door-to-door; and the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) — began to work together in August 2011 to make Katraj a zero garbage-exporting ward.
This meant ensuring that citizens segregated their waste, and that garbage was disposed of in an environmentally responsible way. Ultimately, the project asks, can dump sites be done away with altogether?
“The first step was to remove garbage bins placed by the municipal corporation at various junctions,” says Saroj Badgujar, a senior programme officer with Janwani. “The second and more difficult step was to put in a foolproof system of door-to-door collection of segregated waste. If the garbage was collected then the citizens wouldn’t need to throw trash in the bins.”
The main challenge was to teach citizens to separate biodegradable and non-biodegradable waste, because the two kinds of waste are treated differently. Janwani used tools like home visits, announcements from vehicles and street puppet theatre to deliver its message.
A second challenge was to create value from the waste, by processing all organic or “wet” waste within the ward and by recycling “dry” waste. All wet waste now goes to a local biogas plant, where it is used to generate electricity for streetlights. Dry trash like plastic, glass and paper is sold for recycling by the waste-pickers.
Each household pays Rs 1 a day for waste collection. A waste-picker serves 250-500 households; taking monthly earnings to Rs 7,500-15,000 plus Rs 1,200-1,500 from the sale of dry waste. In Katraj there are 11,000 properties and close to 36,000 citizens. The ward generates 10-11 tonnes of waste a day, of which five tonnes is wet waste.
Janwani conducted training sessions for the waste-pickers, and stressed cleanliness and sticking to schedules. The pickers got pushcarts, gloves and cleaning equipment.
“I don’t know about the project and the environment. But I can say that things have definitely changed for the better for us since this zero-garbage project,” says Archana Lonimare, 40, a waste-picker with SWaCH for five years. “We have started earning more than before. It is still not sufficient, but it gives us a feeling that we are a part of something big.”
She does complain that “The waste is never segregated well to the last bit by householders. We still have to inspect it. And, don’t you think one rupee per day per house is too little?”
Householders, on the other hand, feel that pickers do not do their job well, fail to stick to the timings and sometimes do not show up at all. “Removing municipal garbage bins is definitely a way of keeping the city clean,” says Rekha Anand, an obstetrician and Katraj resident. “They tend to overflow, people litter around them, animals forage for food in them, and diseases spread. But if the waste-pickers don’t come even for one day,” she asks, “where are we to dump the garbage? It is unhygienic to keep the earlier day’s waste inside the house or society premises.”
The biogas plant, set up by the PMC, processes Katraj’s five daily tonnes of wet waste in eight hours. There are only 22 biogas plants in Pune now. So when the zero-garbage programme is extended to the whole city, starting in March, Janwani plans to set up a biogas plant in every ward.
In Katraj, the programme was subsidised by the PMC and Cummins India, which gave Rs 28.5 lakh and offered 3,000 employees as volunteers. The volunteers would spend two hours a day helping Janwani to create awareness. Janwani estimates that Rs 25 lakh will be needed in each ward, to put systems in place. It will look for corporate sponsorship.
Scaling up is a major undertaking, but Badgujar offers few details. “We are finalising a new technology, other than biogas,” she says, “for the treatment of wet waste for an end-product which will be better than biogas. Janwani will also eventually seek corporate sponsorship to set up plants and provide cleaning tools.” The alternate technology, she says, “will be cheaper than biogas”.
If the Katraj zero-garbage model proves itself across Pune — and, in its favour, it is neither complicated nor high-tech — it might be worth emulating in other cities. In the meantime, it will be a relief to the villagers who live next door to the landfills.
