Cleaning India: We need more than just brooms

India generates large amounts of waste. It is gratifying to see public servants wielding brooms to clean up their offices and surrounding areas, but this is not going to solve the waste problem. We need a concerted strategy to address the problem of municipal solid waste which is nothing but waste generated by us every day.

Nearly 31 per cent of 120 crore Indians live in cities and each of them generates 170 grams to 620 grams of waste every day depending on his or her socio-economic status. Needless to say, the rich generate more waste.

In good old days, typical households generated waste mostly from kitchens. Glass bottles, newspapers and empty milk sachets would be kept aside to be sold to the "raddiwala" at the end of the month. This was 25-30 years ago.

Just look at the thrash we generate nowadays - aluminum cans, plastic bottles, wrappers of different types, cardboard boxes, plastic and paper bags and so on.

Everything comes packaged - from grocery and vegetables to phones and pizzas.

We generate waste while we are working, shopping and watching movies as well - paper napkins, tea and coffee cups made out paper and plastic, take away food packaging, paper plates, pop corn cups, empty sachets of pan masala, cigarette packets etc.

Recycling is a solution but in India we hardly segregate our waste. Some waste material carries "recyclable" logo, but even such waste is not amenable to recycling all the time.

For instance, cardboard boxes that carry "recyclable's" sign can't be recycled directly because they get contaminated with food crumbs and greasy slurry. Such contamination can clog recycling machines.

So, what happens to the trash we generate, in the absence of any segregation? It all lands up in open dumps or landfills located on the periphery of cities.

Over the years, these dumps pile up so much trash that they begin to appear like hills, just as the Ghazipur dump on National Highway 24 where a bulk of Delhi's trash is stored. After some years, these dumps are abandoned by municipal authorities and they start looking for new locations.

This is the standard operating procedure in urban areas currently, but such waste disposal system is unsustainable, environment-unfriendly, uneconomic and unscientific.

Solutions are well known and have been highlighted in innumerable government reports. We need an integrated approach towards solid waste management with stress on segregation of waste at source and efficient utilization of various components of the waste.

It is high time we realise that waste we generate is a resource.

However, this resource extraction has to be done prudently otherwise ill-conceived schemes like burning mixed waste to produce energy can lead to new environmental problems, as seen in the Okhla waste-to energy plant in the capital. We need a clear, well-defined and environment-friendly strategy to deal with waste.

For this to happen, our leaders will have to spend more time on drawing boards rather than on wielding brooms. Meanwhile, we as consumers too have a responsibility to reduce the waste we generate.