SWASH Village – Solid Waste
Management
Because waste management is a very delicate issue in rural
India, this project is very ambitious and demands full commitment. The
overarching objective is to transform all waste produced by village
stakeholders into resources in order to achieve a zero-waste environment. Typically,
all waste is accumulated in dustbins; the rest is either sent to the landfill
or burned. More often than not, because the stakeholders are unfamiliar with
the consequences of inadequate waste disposal (i.e. environmental and health
degradation), they are not collaborative and unwilling to make efforts to make
this project succeed.
Littering Point in Naddi
Dharamshala's landfill(to which a major part of Naddi's waste goes and is left untreated and burned)
There
is no correct methodology. If the team brainstorms an idea likely to work, it
is welcome by the project coordinator but this latter has been working in these
conditions for a very long time and he has enough hindsight to know what is the
right way to tackle this issue.
Because SWASH Village interns are independent workers, they
often lose focus; they tend to feel discouraged when the results are not
immediate. That is what they often misunderstand. The objective of all EduCARE
projects is not to obtain practical results, but to create knowledge while conducting
research and through experimentation at the grassroots level.
We have been working on the solid waste management project
for a month now. Initially, we sought viable solutions for waste management at
the village scale, gathering as much information as possible by employing surveys
conducted by previous interns. In parallel, we tried to locate proximate
processing facilities to adequately dispose of the resources we collect. Without
success. In fact, it seems there are no regional solutions for waste. The only solution
we have come across are garbage collectors, individuals who collect and sell
plastic bottles, glass and cardboard to manufacturers. Others travel
door-to-door, exchanging the above for onions and potatoes.
We worked at first stage in the household just next to the
place where the volonteers of Educare are living. We are currently
collaborating with one household which accommodates numerous EduCARE
volunteers. We have built a structure to facilitate waste segregation. Moreover,
because the structure is constructed entirely of collected resources, the aim
was to prove that waste materials can be converted into resources.
After multiple meetings with our project director we came to
the conclusion that we first had to focus on the segregation of waste and its
detailed study rather than thinking of how this waste could be valued, recycled,
and incentivized for the stakeholders. Getting to this stage of understanding
and clarity took us a bit more time than anticipated. We are currently in the process of creating an
extremely meticulous waste segregation point – or as we’ve named it our “Resource
Recovery Station” – where every category of dry waste will have its own
separate bag/bin, so that when the time comes, each category is efficiently
transported, sold or put to use.
We’ve also created a database where every product (including
different items in each category) is accounted for and put under scrutiny in
order to gather maximum amount of information on its composition and
recyclability.
Following are the objectives for the second stage of our
project:
1.
Establish a waste management system for the
hotels and Airbnbs which encourages proper disposal of waste in every room as
per the categories set for different wastes.
2.
Find a way to minimize the amount of waste that
is stored for a potential reuse.
3.
Find a way to eliminate/reduce the waste that is
too greasy or beyond being recycled and valued in any way without polluting the
environment.
Comments
Post a Comment