Plastics
Recycling & Waste Management:
Experience in Mumbai Wards and
Eco-Sensitive Hill Station - Matheran
In
Mumbai, constant effort is being made to separate the dry and wet
waste at the source itself, so that the dry wastes could be further
segregated into different types of wastes and could be sent for recycling,
resulting in lesser load to the landfill sites.
Waste Management: Segregation
of Recyclable Waste at Source
In
all parts of the country, people by and large do salvage reusable
or saleable material from waste and sell it for a price, e.g., newspaper,
glass bottles, empty tins, plastic bags, old clothes etc., and to
that extent such reusable/recyclable waste material is not thrown
out for disposal. However, a lot of recyclable dry waste such as waste
paper, plastic, broken glass, metal, packaging material, etc., is
not segregated and is thrown on the streets along with domestic/ trade/
institutional waste. Such waste is picked up to some extent by poor
rag pickers for their livelihood. At times they empty the dustbins
and spread the contents around for effective sorting and collection.
By throwing such recyclable material on the streets or into a common
dustbin, the quality of recyclable material deteriorates as it gets
soiled by wet waste, which often contains contaminated and hazardous
wastes. Households and establishments, who throw such waste on the
streets or in the municipal bins unsegregated, thus do not seriously
practice the segregation of recyclable waste at source. At least 15%
of the total waste can conveniently be segregated at source for recycling,
which is being thrown on the streets in absence of the practice of
segregation of waste at source. Part of this waste is picked up by
ragpickers in a soiled condition and sold to middle men at a low price,
who in turn pass on the material to the recycling industry at a higher
price after cleaning or segregation and the waste that remains uncollected
finds its way to the dumping grounds.
Land Filling Practices
By and large, crude dumping of waste is done in
the country without following the principles of sanitary land filling.
As negligible segregation of waste at source takes place, all waste
including hospital infectious waste generally finds its way to the
disposal site. Quite often industrial hazardous waste is also deposited
at dump sites meant for domestic waste. The waste deposited at the
dump site is generally neither spread nor compacted on a regular basis.
It is also not covered with inert material. Thus, very unhygienic
conditions prevail on the dump sites.
Segregation of Recyclable
Waste
It is essential to save the recyclable waste material
from going to the waste processing and disposal sites and using up
landfill space. Salvaging it at source for recycling could make profitable
use of such material. This will save national resource and also save
the cost and efforts to dispose of such waste. This can be done by
forming a habit of keeping recyclable waste material separate from
food waste and other bio-degradable wastes, in a separate bag or bin
at the source of waste generation, by having a two-bin system for
storage of waste at homes, shops and establishments where the domestic
food waste (cooked and uncooked) goes into the municipal system and
recyclable waste can be handed over to the waste collectors (rag-pickers)
at the doorstep.
....contd.
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