Waste management strategy for Guwahati

Indore has been named the cleanest city for the sixth consecutive year in the annual cleanliness survey conducted by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs and the secret lies in 100% segregated door-to-door waste collection, efficient processing and disposal besides regular cleanliness drives in residential as well as commercial areas. Guwahati slipping 30 places to 342nd rank from 312 in 2021 paints a grim picture of waste management becoming a complete mess in the Gateway to Northeast. Results from the Swachh Survekshan 2022 show that segregated door-to-door waste collection and daily sweeping in residential areas is less than 25% in Guwahati. In most households, the waste is not segregated and even if it is segregated during collection in some localities, it is done only as dry and wet waste. In Indore, waste is segregated into six types - wet, plastic, non-plastic, electronic, biomedical and hazardous at source and collection vans deployed by Indore Municipal Corporation with six partitioned compartments, one each for each type of waste which makes processing much easier. Such scientific collection and processing have facilitated establishment of the Asia's largest bio-CNG plant in Indore on private-public partnership model on a dumping site. The plant has the capacity to process 550 tonne of organic solid municipal wastes to generate about 18,000 kg of bio-CNG and 100 tonnes of organic compost daily. The municipal corporation tied up with the plant authority to purchase bio-CNG at Rs 5 a kg for running its fleet of 400 city buses and will also get annual royalty of Rs 2.5 crore. For the bio-CNG plant to become sustainable, availability of segregated organic waste is a must and, therefore, establishment of similar plant in any other city without first replicating the Indore success story of efficient segregation of wastes at household level cannot be expected to be sustainable. Wet domestic food and kitchen wastes, if left unprocessed at landfill site and not used to produce biogas or compost through biomethanation, release the greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere adding to greenhouse emissions in the city. Indore Municipal Corporation has also put in place decentralized organic waste processing with aggregated capacity of 150 tonne a day at more than 230 hotels, hospitals, educational institutions, marriage venues, 76 residential units, all city gardens and about 30,000 compositing bins at household level which demonstrate the minute planning and execution of city's waste management through active participation of different stakeholders in the society. The fact that door-to-door collection was started in Indore as a pilot project in two of the city's 84 wards and achievement of about 100% in just one year moved its ranking 25 places to top of the chart in 2017 demonstrate that the turnaround and achievement on scale in a city like Guwahati is possible if an efficient system waste segregation at household level is established. Guwahati with about 12 lakh population generates municipal solid waste of 550 Tonnes Per Day (TPD) but a biomethanation plant of 5 TPD capacity running at Chatribari, an organic waste converter of 2.5 TPD capacity and four material recovery facility are all the capital city has for processing solid waste. Even for existing processing facilities, the gap between the installed capacity and utilization is more than 10 % which speaks volumes about non-availability of adequate quantities of organic waste due to lack of segregation. Growing piles of unsegregated solid waste at dumpsites in Guwahati, super suckers purchased by GMC authorities for clearing drainage blockages lying unutilized and alleged irregularities in cleaning operation point towards systematic failure and misplaced priorities which needs to be rectified through capacity building, better planning and strengthening monitoring and evaluation. A massive awareness drive in city residential areas, marketplaces, business and commercial establishments, educational institutions for keeping multiple bins for segregating different types of wastes, organic as well as inorganic, at source can be the first step towards building the ecosystem for complete overhaul in waste management in the city. The GMC authorities simultaneously converting garbage collecting vans modelled like those in Indore with partitioned compartments will motivate the city residents to make segregation at source a habit. Each member of a family, commercial establishment, educational, government or private organization being aware about the importance of segregating waste at source in keeping the city clean is crucial for achieving the desired objectives. Such community initiative will also motivate those with the habit of throwing water bottles and other plastic wastes into open drains to stop such irresponsible acts. To prevent expenditures involved in purchasing separate garbage bins from becoming a de-motivating factor, the campaign needs to focus on using any unused container that would otherwise be discarded and sold as scrap and colour coding different containers for different type of waste. Guwahati needs a comprehensive waste management solution, not piecemeal approaches.