Solid waste management
Landfills are common in Australia and the United States. For a good reason. Each country has thousands of square miles of open spaces completely devoid of human habitation. So dumping, the oldest and cheapest method of waste management known to man, is the norm. But open landfills are problematic in countries like Nepal and India with high population densities. Since there is human settlement in nearly every part of Nepal, where do you throw all the garbage? Kathmandu alone churns out around 500 metric tons of waste a day.
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They have to be disposed of somehow, somewhere. That somewhere has been the Sisdole landfill site at Okharpauwa VDC in Nuwakot district located at a safe distance of 30km from the capital city. Around 6,000 people call Okharpauwa their home. The volume of their complaints, predictably, is as high as the pile of trash that has accumulated at the site over the last seven years. Trucks ferrying garbage are often halted by locals who have become adept at blackmailing the government into providing them everything from lucrative jobs to better schools. They are it again. This time four waste-collection vehicles were set on fire by local cadres of different political parties after a truck ran over a three-year-old boy. Angry drivers have since refused to resume work. Meanwhile, the mini-mountains of trash by the roadside are scaling new heights in Kathmandu.
Cleaner (and less politically-charged) alternatives will have to be explored. But that is easier said than done. Incinerating waste could be one of the solutions, as the space-constrained Japan has successfully practiced over the years. But incinerators are pricy, especially the ones that trap harmful gases emitted in burning of toxic waste. The other way out could be to open waste management to private sector. The government did so six years ago. Recently two private companies, Nepwaste and Clean Valley Company, have been given the nod to prepare feasibility plans to collect, recycle and dispose of Kathmandu's waste.
The two companies believe they have worked out viable and environment-friendly ways to manage waste of the only metropolis in Nepal. Since 60 percent of the capital's waste is bio-degradable, it can be converted into commercial fertilizers. The rest can be recycled and the resulting products sold for profit. If the two companies have their arithmetic right, the government could do its bit to help them. For one, the Solid Waste Management Act (2011) that clearly outlines the obligation of individual households to sort their thrash into degradable and non-degradable kinds could be better implemented.
The other cost effective method would be 'waste reduction'—encouraging people to use second-hand goods, to repair their old transistors and mobiles rather buy new ones, and to discourage plastic use. Dumping waste in the middle of a human settlement and forgetting about it till the locals find another excuse to disrupt the fifth trail is not a sustainable solution, nor a very healthy one. The much ballyhooed public-private partnership hasn't amounted to much in other areas. It appears to hold more promise in waste management. Both the sides believe they can work out a win-win formula soon. But the two million Kathmanduites—long used to tossing out their thrash and then complaining why no one picks after them—aren't holding their breath.
