India’s real problem with waste is not what you think it is

India’s garbage and waste problem is visible, literally. As India’s urbanization and industrialization is increasing, so is the waste generation. As per last available estimates, urban India generates around 62 million tonnes of municipal solid waste (MSW) annually. Around 50% of total waste is dumped in landfill sites, 20–30% is recycled and around 20–30% gets littered around in streets and water bodies.

Cleaning the streets won’t solve the waste problem

Various government initiatives and growing awareness are helping increase the collection rates and reducing litter — which has benefits of cleaner, safer and healthier neighborhoods. But while the waste will be out of sight, it won’t be out of environment. India’s real problem is to find a path to zero waste — way to ensure that there is no waste left in the environment.

Landfills are pieces of scarce land, and transporting waste to landfills requires them to stay in vicinity of the city. Mumbai and Delhi have only 3 landfill sites each, Bengaluru and Chennai have 2 each and Hyderabad has a single landfill site. No wonder, congestion at these landfill sites is a daily phenomenon. With hundreds of garbage collection trucks lining up, each truck typically waits in queue for 2–3 hours to weigh the amount of waste collected and then waits for another hour at least to dump the waste into the landfill.

Landfills are known to be one of the biggest generators of Greenhouse gases, leachate is extremely toxic and is a huge risk to both surface and underground water sources, landfills generates foul odor and are a source of several health and other issues. None of this is desirable, least in vicinity of large populations.

So where shall the waste go

Various waste audits reveal that around 40% of India’s MSW is biodegradable, among which food waste is the single largest component. The other large categories include paper & packaging, plastic, rubber, metal, glass and inert. Currently only 20–30% of the total waste is being recycled and rest is dumped in landfills or littered around.

The only sustainable way to create a circular economy is by generating real economic benefits of recycling. The “waste” of a business should be valuable resources for another efficient manufacturing industry. But this requires everything — collection, transportation & storage, processing and conversion — to be done in an efficient and industrial scale.

What is the real challenge of waste recycling

The real challenge of recycling is finding sustainable economic use cases of any “resources” generated from the waste. The prevalent primary use cases of waste in India are:

Composting

Since India’s MSW has large organic content, the most prevalent treatment method is composting. More than 300 composting/vermi-composting plants are installed in various cities of India. Several cities have made it mandatory for large waste generators to install composting facilities at their facilities and mechanical composting units of small and large sizes are also installed. There are also policy initiatives to assist distribution of compost through fertilizer distribution channels. However, the economics of composting continues to remain unfavorable resulting in growth only through support systems. Sale price of compost is less than half of subsidized urea prices making its commercial production nonviable.

Thermal Treatment

India’s MSW has low calorific value than its counterparts in West and China because of high wet and inert content making it unattractive for incineration. Several projects that convert the waste into energy have either failed or run in losses due to insufficient availability of high calorific value waste content.

Besides incinerators, projects involving generation of Refuse-derived Fuel (RDF) and gassification have also faced unsustainable economics.

E-Waste Recycling

India is world’s fifth largest e-waste generator at around 1.5 million tons per annum growing at 25% yoy. Almost 60 per cent of e-waste is a mix of large and small electrical and electronic equipment used in homes and businesses. Despite the Extended Producer Responsibility rules covering e-Waste and the high value of the salvage, recovery is less than 20% and recyclers produce emission of precious metals exceeding 400 times that of European threshold (Schluep, 2010).

Plastic Recycling

India generates nearly 26,000 tonnes of plastic waste every day. According to CPCB, 94% of this is thermoplastic, or recyclable materials such as PET and PVC. It is estimated that about 60 percent of plastic waste in India is recycled.

However, with low prices of petroleum products and natural gas, the price of virgin PET has collapsed making recycled PET more expensive. Single-use plastics are being used to fuel cement furnaces and build roads, but still that remains at a low level and perhaps not the best use of the resource.

What is missing?

For effective recycling to work, it requires scalable solutions that can match the scale of the waste being generated. However, viability of any large scale industry would depend on supply and demand.

For supply, an efficient enabling infrastructure is required for collection, segregation, transport and pre-processing of waste — and subsequently supply to intermediates who can convert it into high quality marketable products.

An intermediate industry needs to come up which looks at the waste resources in a refinery model. The highest value items are extracted progressively until reaching a tipping point beyond which the economics are no more favourable for extraction. The residue can then be either incinerated for its calorific value or used in applications for its weight.

At the same time, the intermediate resources need to be absorbed by industries on large scale by ramping up of demand for these resources to create a pull.

As they say, “wasting the waste” is a huge loss of resources. While waste is a large problem but it cannot be solved only by focus on upstream reduction and efficiency improvement. Achieving a status where none of the waste reaches landfills requires a holistic attempt of quantifying the resources being wasted, identifying opportunities and establishing benchmarks against which progress can be measured.