Trash it right: We must transform waste management
Heard of the Trash Isles? It’s a ‘country’ with over 100,000 citizens, with Judi Dench as its queen and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson as defence minister. This floating mass of trash clumped together and polluting the Pacific Ocean was declared an imagined country by an awareness campaign to focus attention on the ‘no man’s land’ that gets polluted by everyone’s waste but is taken care of by no one.
Today, it is the world’s 26th smallest ‘country’ by population, with all its ‘citizens’ (people who have signed up to clean up the mess) pledging to reduce consumption of single-use plastic. This is one of many examples that exist in a sea of creative solutions driven by the need for environmental action.
Whether it is oceanic clean-ups or using flowers from temples for making incense sticks, the idea is to make zero-waste economies the norm. Over the past few years, waste management has seen a paradigm shift in terms of policies and perspectives.
How we manage our waste at individual and organizational levels shows a seismic change in perspective: waste is no longer something to discard instantly, but a reservoir of resources, given all the materials to be recovered for reuse. How are current policies different from traditional waste management practices? India’s current policy framework aims to eliminate landfills or have less than 10% of waste going into these.
This forms the basis of ‘zero waste’ policies that are part of the Solid Waste Management Rules in India. To achieve this end result, we will need to introduce a holistic system that begins with the collection of segregated waste, followed closely by further sorting into multiple categories, the aggregation of each category, and finally its dispatch to various
. Read more on livemint.com
