Now, why should this make you feel guilty?
Devendra Acharya, Central Coordinator of Nepce Mac, one of the leading Solid Waste Management companies in the country, guarantees that many Nepalis won’t have realized the reason.
“It’s easy to find concerned citizens complaining about the environmental damage caused by pollution. Many Nepalis also publicly claim to be embarrassed and frustrated by the mismanagement of solid waste but what they don’t acknowledge is that they play a significant part in creating these problems by not following a single step,” says Acharya.
Separate your garbage – put the bio degradable waste from the kitchen and the dry waste in different bins or bags. This largely underappreciated and underestimated practice is yet to catch on among our city dwellers, but those involved in waste management of the city see it as one of the major factors that is stopping them from doing their jobs efficiently.
Acharya, for instance, explains his current problem, “We decided to make the most of the situation by developing compost. At the moment, we make from one to one and a half ton of compost every single day. It might seem like progress but I assure you, it isn’t. Nepce Mac alone is capable of making 75 tons of compost each day. If we were to talk about the rest of the 60 plus other companies and NGOs involved in garbage collection, there could be around 300 tons of compost produced every
single day.”
The fact that most of the households are not separating their waste is the only flaw in their otherwise
environment friendly plan. The workers at Nepce Mac can rustle through only so many garbage bags and as it is, apparently most of the times, the mixed waste can’t be salvaged for compost production. So despite knowing better, at the end of the day, Archarya doesn’t have any choice but to send it all to be dumped in the landfill.
“It’s a researched fact that 60-70% of the waste that comes from Nepali households is biodegradable. Just imagine the possibilities. We could reuse and recycle majority of our garbage for various purposes. The only damper in this plan is that most of us aren’t separating our waste before throwing it out,” says Bishnu Thakali.
As the President of Women Environment Preservation Committee (WEPCO), she speaks from experience. Back in the 90s, her NGO had begun a community based program to clean various wards around town. This involved personally making sure that each of their concerned localities was aware of the importance of segregating their waste and religiously practicing it as well. At one time, they had even fixed a schedule; the WEPCO members were going to collect the biodegradable waste twice a week on certain days and the other waste, once a week some other day.
This practice had enabled the NGO to run eight compost sheds. They were also able to maintain bio gas supplies for their own office use as well as two local restaurants nearby. WEPCO had even started recycling papers to create merchandises for charity sale. Unfortunately, these operations have been presently stalled due to construction and land issues. However, Thakali and her NGO have shown how “possibilities” can materialize.
“It’s such a simple step. Just separate the waste at home and we can do the rest. If you use different bins from the start itself, you won’t even have to dirty your hands in the end. Then anybody who has any knowledge of environment preservation can go forth with various projects to reuse and recycle. But in cases where the garbage is not separated, we have no choice but to dump it in landfills. Now if only everybody had seen the horror of Sisdole, maybe then citizens wouldn’t be so indifferent,” says Thakali.
If we were to trace back the history of solid waste management in our cities, Kathmandu in particular, it all goes back to the early 1980s. Before that, the tradition among the households was to manage their own waste. Most chose to turn it into fertilizers then as well. However around 1982-83, an international project was ushered it and they suggested that the city collect its garbage and dump it at a proper site. Big yellow bins could be seen around town and while the project did help with the cleanliness of the city, after it phased out and the responsibility was transferred to the local authorities, the city started suffering from the waste management problems that’s so familiar today.
“The fact is we used to manage our own waste. Everybody had gardens and they used the manure to grow vegetables and flowers. However, after the project, people got into a habit of throwing their waste out on the streets. If only we had capitalized on our traditional methods, I believe we would have made a lot of progress by now,” says Acharya.
Nevertheless, some private companies like Acharya’s Nepce Mac and NGO’s like Thakali’s WEPCO are trying to play their part in bringing back the environment friendly tradition. But cooperation on part of the public is crucial. Then there is the government’s collaboration and assistance. One might wonder why the officials haven’t been proactively enforcing this practice especially since the people involved in waste management confidently claim that separating waste will help with its management by hundred folds.
This is where bureaucracy rears its ugly head. Rabin Man Shrestha, Chief of the Environment Management Division at Kathmandu Metropolitan City Office, claims that many of the department’s plans regarding solid waste management have largely been put on pause because they were instructed not to act upon them while Nepwaste and Clean Valley were preparing their feasibility plans to become the first private firms to handle garbage disposals. This was more than six years ago. Their detailed progress reports are currently being negotiated. Shrestha hopes to run these sorts of programs with them, if their reports are approved. He also dismisses the likes of Nepce Mac and WEPCO as informal groups.
Where the waste segregation practice is concerned, Shrestha claims the government has been there and done that. “We gave out two sets of dustbins years ago and carried out various awareness campaigns as well but it was incredibly challenging to make every household comply. People were washing clothes in the bins or using it for other purposes. With our limited manpower, we couldn’t give it continuity. Besides, the households weren’t cooperative to begin with,” explains Shrestha.
Archarya and Thakkali both disagree. They call it being ‘lazy’ and lament about the fact that they don’t have the power to enforce rules because as they see it, poor monitoring and enforcement of the existing policies are the main reasons behind the country’s waste management woes. In many ways, all this is an apt reflection of all the underlying tension among the bodies that are involved in this sector.
But while the bickering goes on, we have to ask ourselves: Isn’t it time we felt a sense of obligation towards our cities and started managing our wastes better?
priyankagurungg@gmail.com
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