A. Damodaran is a Professor in Economics and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. His specialisation has been environmental policy and economics. Apart from several publications in the field and the academic positions he has occupied both in India and abroad, he has worked for the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests in the 1990s. He was an Environmental Fellow with the U.S. Environment Protection Agency in 1994. Later Prof. Damodaran joined as the Central Government Executive Trainee in Karnataka in 1984-85, during which he worked on revenue and development administration matters for Mandur village. This prompted The Hindu -HABITAT to speak to him on issues dogging solid waste management in the city. Mandur, a much talked-about peripheral area of ‘the Garden City,’ endures the effects of the garbage dumps reaching there, even as it protests and awaits government action to find a different methodology to handle city wastes.
Excerpts…
Not just Bangalore, but within the country too the monumental problem of solid waste accumulation continues. Are we lagging behind in basics?
The simple reason is that there is a premium for waste dumping in urban India. You have vacant public lands that are available in peri-urban villages that can be effortlessly used for dumping wastes. These were village commons at one point in time, which were turned into public lands and subsequently converted as waste dumps (as in Mandur). Sanitary landfills as an idea has remained only on paper.
In many countries, landfills and incinerators have fallen out of favour. Do you think the political risks of landfills and combustors are rated higher than the environmental risks?
I would term the former as land dumps. They are clearly unsustainable and socially unjust. Incinerators were used for managing municipal solid wastes in the West but they were virtually abandoned by the 1970s. In India we have been infamous for producing poorly designed incinerators, while we are using them to burn organic wastes! Even when it comes to medical wastes, where incinerators serve a useful purpose, I am not sure that these equipment are free from secondary hazards (like fugitive emissions of carcinogens like dioxins).
Are local composting, waste-to-energy plants and recycling the three safer options for dealing with MSW today?
I think that we do not have an ‘ecosystem’ for local composting in residential areas in Bangalore. Residential areas are congested, there are few vacant spaces and the very few ones available have to be kept for amenities. The greater tragedy is that residential areas are gradually getting converted into commercial spots. Solid waste management is not just a function of the municipalities. We have to take a fresh look at the edifice of town planning, if we have to manage our solid wastes in situ .
Yes, recycling works well — on paper. Given the congested nature of our residences, household recycling facilities are seriously constrained for ordinary citizens. Where rodents compete with human beings for space (including sewer space) in cities, recycling invites greater health hazards. And to repeat, we have to re-engineer our town planning systems to handle solid wastes.
But why not also have ‘waste-to-energy plants’ in key metro cities as ‘large commercial scale pilots’ (with power generation capacity upwards of 20 MW) that have the potential to demonstrate their business utility for more such units to come up in other big cities? These units could be tied up to a national CO2 allowance grid.
The American business schools offer studies that advise the government on recycling…
The U.S. has learnt from its mistakes in urbanisation. I had the good occasion to closely look at the U.S. EPA’s functioning in the area of solid wastes in the Atlanta region, when I interned with them as an environmental fellow in the 1990s. Their municipalities, however, never flinched from the idea of scale economies. Their transportation techniques have improved in the directions of more mass / trip. Baling and segregation are a way of life for U.S. municipalities when it comes to handling wastes. Their leachate collection systems are the best in the world. They experiment and consistently improve. From massive clean-up operations, they have moved upwards of the waste chain to achieve source reduction.
Do you think that the cost of municipal solid waste management must be passed on to waste generators i.e., households, industries and commercial enterprises on a pay-as-you-throw basis?
I think we need to look at which segment of society is generating solid wastes. For people like me who generate wastes that create social costs, there is no question of not paying for it. Our conventional retail marketing chains that relied on the unorganised sector were the most sustainable entities when it came to solid waste management. And they were not commercial in the sense we understand of giant retail chains today.
What are the steps you would recommend to solve the problem of solid wastes in Bangalore?
*Pooling of organic wastes mobilised from households has to reach the ward level or nearby composting facilities
* Setting up two large capacity solid waste management plants to handle non-organic wastes. Get the current waste management facilities in Mandur up and running and upscale the same to a waste-to-energy plant
* Leachate collection and disposal system should be introduced in Mandur and other waste disposal sites. A ‘clean-up fund’ is needed to salvage the groundwater basin in the area.
* For new residential layouts work out space for sanitary handling and composting of organic wastes. Take a re-look at existing layouts for possibilities of locating composting plants.
*Apart from safe drinking water supplies for humans and animals, have special animal husbandry facilities for villages that suffer from the fall-out of waste dumping.
