Why we need to pay to manage our waste
[Music]
i’d like to share with you two stories
and the first story is about anand
a local scrap dealer i live
in an apartment in bangalore and every
sunday
um ananth comes into our apartment and
sets up sister’s crab shop
outside our gate and then he goes to
various different households
picks up newspaper
carton boxes plastic and he pays
the household for this material brings
the waste
back to this little scrap shop and then
finally
at the end of the day all of this waste
goes
aggregates and then gets sold out to a
recycler
now on the face of it it may seem like a
win
for all but actually it’s not a win for
anand
and i as an entrepreneur know that
because the revenues that he gets
from the sale of this crap will
barely meet all his operational costs
and will barely give him a slim
margin as remuneration for himself
he will also have his wife and his child
in the business because he doesn’t have
to pay them a salary
and even if he could afford an assistant
he would barely be able to pay this
assistant
fair wages so in 21st
century india we have to recognize this
model for what it is
it is an exploitative model and just
because middle class india wants to be
paid for newspapers
we have a system which really encourages
social injustice it encourages
children in the system and it hardly
takes care of our waste
problem because actually this kind of
scrap
is barely two percent of the total waste
that we generate in our homes or in our
offices
my second story is about my journey
in waste and my relationship with waste
so i was just out of college in the
mid-80s
and studied german and therefore decided
that i would like to be a tour guide
and use my language skills so i travel
through the country with my german
tourists
all of us very happy because india is
this great country
wonderful art architecture people
cuisine and then there was this defining
moment one day in madurai outside the
meenakshi temple
we were all awestruck by this you know
the
huge gateways people prayers
and all of that tourists taking pictures
of the temple
and then there was this one tourist who
went slightly
at the side and started taking pictures
of all the waste
and the dumb and you know the ugly sight
around it
and then this tourist turned to me and
said what are you
as a young person going to do about this
side of india now this question stayed
with me for many years in fact it stayed
with me for 20 years and it frustrated
me because
every time i saw garbage you know i felt
helpless
finally when i turned 40 i decided that
this
is the time for me now i would want to
get
into solutions around waste the trigger
for me was also at that time the
municipal solid waste rules
which came out just a year before in
2000
and these municipal solid waste rules
from the government of india
were very aligned with my ideas of what
i wanted to do
it talked of waste as a resource it
talked of
each stakeholder including consumers
actually taking responsibility for their
waste
so that for me was the beginning
of my journey into actually a solution
around waste and i set up this
organization called sahas
sahas in the first few years we worked
as a not-for-profit
uh we focused a lot on reduce which is
the first r
in waste management we also did a lot of
campaigns around
you know less plastic but i knew that
the actual i had to also get into the
real solutions
and that meant um you know taking the
waste of the streets
converting all our waste into resources
so i realized that this solution
now needed a business solution it needed
to be more professional
and that for me was then the start
of transitioning sahas the ngo
to a private limited social enterprise
and so here we are asahas zero waste
which i started in 2013
uh looking to actually bring always
whether it had economic value or not
into a resource um and
today we have three service lines um the
first service line
is around creating a zero waste
campus i mean 40 percent of all our
city’s waste comes from what we call
bulk generators so here you have the
tech parks
the office complexes the malls the
educational institutions
and we actually partner with each of
these as our customers
and then we convert them into zero waste
campuses our second service line is
around
bringing back consumer
waste it could be plastic waste it could
be electronic waste
channeling it through a reverse
logistics system
so that it doesn’t go on our streets it
doesn’t go on to the dump site
it gets recycled and the third service
line
is our sale of products because finally
if we have to
not have waste on our streets the waste
should come back in our homes
and by selling these products we really
close the loop
we bring it back into our homes and we
also demonstrate
a circular economy so let me show you
what happens
in one of our customer locations in
bangalore
and that is the office of microsoft they
have this
big nice campus uh in bangalore
which houses about 3 000 employees
and generates about 1.2 tons
of waste per day they’ve knocked off all
these single-use plastic so
you know there’s less waste on campus
they also have a very good segregation
system
but what we also have is on campus
a unit which manages all their waste
and our team manages that waste so when
the wet waste comes to us
there is a biogas plant on campus and
all the food waste is fed into this
biodigester
from there we get gas that gas is then
piped into the kitchen
and food is cooked there all the dry
waste
comes thank you all the dry waste
comes into the again into our unit
our women do a sorting into paper
plastic metal glass
this waste now moves to our
material recovery facility which is our
factory for waste
and there we have 20 plus categories of
waste in which
you know the materials are sorted so you
will get about six different types of
paper seven different types of plastic
and all of this material is now
a resource all of this material goes
you know into recycling and we then get
paid
by our recyclers but the company also
pays us
a service fee which meets all our
operations
we work like this with several such
campuses and we also work with builders
like rmz in bangalore is a very big
builder
and we partner with all their campuses
to make them
zero waste campus
okay so today sahas manages
80 tons of waste per day
and we have a team strength of 300
250 of them mostly women are our
backbone of our organization they are a
field team
and we make sure because we have a
service fee that we pay them
fair wages so you have them now
move up from you know very low income
households
to a level of being lower middle class
what is the situation in india yeah it
is
in india now we all know the kind of
you know waste garbage problems that we
have around the country
we have 62 million tons of waste being
generated
every year of which just about 70
percent
is actually collected and 20
[Music]
processed it’s it’s
scary it’s frightening it’s a big
environment disaster
and why do we have the situation first
of all
no implementation poor enforcement of
the regulations
but also because of our mindsets
a mindset is such now that we look we
don’t understand or we refuse to
recognize the difference
between garbage and waste so whatever
brings us economic value
we will you know manage that but
everything else becomes garbage
so food waste plastic papers all just
mixed
together and when it’s mixed
it can be fixed so this is the waste
that comes on our streets and which
you know we throw our hands up in the
air
waste on the other hand as we’ve seen
is a raw material it’s resource
but it takes extreme effort it takes a
lot of operations
around conversion of this waste
to a resource it takes
investment it takes technology it takes
people
it takes a business model and a business
model
with both a head and a heart so at sahas
we put our heads that’s our zero waste
we’ve put our heads together
to put a professional team in place
to invest in the right technology to
have accountability for every fraction
of waste
till a such time it reaches a recycler
and then the heart is in the
impact because we’re very mindful of all
our waste
going through the cycle we’re very
mindful of our team especially our field
team
being taken care of through at least
fair wages
so it’s always the head and the heart
working together
and that really is the story
of waste to wealth
wealth is really the you know
the uh the kind of resources that we
have the kind of repercussions this
brings in terms of
environment cleaner air cleaner water
wealth is also the social justice system
that we build
now if we want to have and if we value
this wealth
then together we must also commit
collectively
to change and for that to happen
we have to look at adopting
and embracing the polluter pays
principle
so it’s simple all of us are consumers
and all of us through our consumption
patterns
are also polluters so therefore today
as we buy the chips packet and as we buy
that mobile phone
we also have to pay and we as we pay for
the product
we also have to pay for its recycling
and only if we do this will we get
better business models
business models working with the head
and a heart business models
so that anand has the voice
to ask for a service fee when he gives
us this doorstep service
of collecting our newspapers for
recycling
at this point i fondly remember
what nelson mandela said many many years
ago
he said when the head and the heart
work together a formidable force
is created now i do believe that we are
on the brink
of creating a formidable force and it is
this force
that will give us clean air water
soil health social justice
and the ultimate goal of no waste
on our planet thank you
[Music]
you