1. STORAGE AND COLLECTION OF URBAN SOLID WASTE
Mrs Almitra H Patel
Member, Supreme Court Committee
for Solid Waste Management

2. Waste is good material in the wrong place. means keeping items unmixed
What is “WASTE” ????
Waste is good material in the wrong place.
Discards become Waste
ONLY WHEN MIXED !
So Waste Minimisation
means keeping items unmixed
as far as possible.

3. WHO should keep wastes separate?
All of us. That includes Municipalities too.
If one lakh citizens keep their wastes
unmixed, are cities ready, willing and able
to collect and transport them unmixed
until final processing and disposal?
It is easier to change the habits of 200
waste-collection staff than of 1 lac citizens.

4. INDIA HAS THE HIGHEST QTY OF INERTS IN ITS WASTES: 35-50% !
In India, road dust, drain silt and debris are
usually collected in the same trip as garbage 
KEEP THEM UNMIXED. Use them for road embankments and shoulder improvements. Give it free, sell or auction it for plinth filling.
Save transport costs, disposal space and processing cost with separate inerts collection.

5. INERTS ARE THE ENEMY OF BIOMETHANATION
They make it totally unviable, though foreign
firms aggressively pursue this for its subsidies.
Lucknow WTE promoters locked the plant and “ran away” in Dec 2004 after 15 crore subsidy and Rs 83.9 crore investment of Indian taxpayers’ money thru banks, LIC.
Biometh works best only in factories or hotels
where the biogas is immediately used on-site.

6. INERTS ARE the ENEMY OF RDF
Indian waste is so unsuitable for WTE that 30% biomass use is allowed for subsidies + citizens must pay higher power charges !
But at Hyderabad and Vijayawada, almost 90% paddy husk is being used. MSW lies stinking and untreated around the plants “for show”, causing lawsuits and gheraos.
Both cities have lost their precious waste-processing sites to “power-plants” who use it as “free” land with WTE as the excuse.

7. INERTS MAKE INDIAN WASTE LOW- CALORIE, = UNVIABLE FOR WTE :
Rs cr to compost 100 tons of city waste.
Rs 16 crore for biometh of same 100 tpd waste.
Rs 4-5 cr per MW for thermal or hydel power, vs
Rs cr per MW for Waste-To-Energy.
So 15 out of 17 WTE MoUs withdrawn or bankrupt.
MNES has done NO COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS
since 1995 and sought no CPCB approvals either.

8. COLLECT INERTS IN A SEPARATE TRIP, WEEKLY
Composting can handle high inerts, but at high transport cost to farmers buying it, & humus content and quality goes down.
India’s national policy requires composting of biodegradables, to restore our soil vitality, productivity and water-holding.
So Storage and Collection methods must match proposed end-point objectives.

9. KEEP STREETS CLEAN BY NOT DIRTYING THEM FIRST
So we must strive for totally bin-less cities, through door-to-door collection.
This requires commitment & management skills, not money or extra manpower.
Suryapet (pop. 103,000) achieved this in 2003 with no outside funds, and at no extra cost to citizens.
Namakkal is bin-less & “zero-garbage” too.

10. LOW-COST DOOR-to-DOOR OPTIONS
Calcutta started in 1993 with its box-type hand-
carts and staff, but unloads waste on roads.
Handcarts with buckets or barrels allow
handling of waste once only but are costlier.
Nasik trucks stop at lane junctions for a few
minutes while residents bring waste to them.
Suryapet’s tractor trailers do the same.

11. BEGIN WITH DIRTIEST AREAS
Slum-dwellers are the most cooperative,
everywhere. Start with them, & with sweeper-
colonies to demonstrate the ease & benefits.
Blr’s lorry stops at slum entrance while helper
moves through slum with whistle to inform all.
Premnagar slum Goregaon has 45 take-away
bins placed from 8-10 am for 45,000 pop.

12. Visit INDIAN success stories
Our poverty levels defeat models and practices brought in from the West.
Mumbai’s rag-pickers even empty garbage onto pavements to collect their outer bags.
“Wet-dry” street bins are stolen at once.
So plan Ward-wise parking spaces for collection vehicles, with or without bins.