Green Pune, Clean Pune

"Green Pune, Clean Pune" is one of several slogans painted on walls and concrete barriers all over the city. Pune is famous for having one of the most, if not the most, organized and effective waste systems in India. As part of a project my advisor has me working on, I investigated Pune's waste cycle.

"Green Pune, Clean Pune" painted on a wall, ironically next to trash. Photo taken from Google Images.

In Pune, there are several different avenues municipal solid waste (MSW) can follow. Each housing society is served by two waste pickers who belong to the Solid Waste Collection and Handling Cooperative (SWaCH), an enterprise founded by the Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat, the trade union of waste pickers. Each home pays a monthly fee of Rs. 10 to 30 (depending on the area) for waste pickers to directly pick up trash from their homes. This miniscule monthly fee is not how waste pickers make their money, though. They earn cash in the scrap market. They sort the waste and sell the very valuable recyclables to scrap dealers, who in turn sell scrap to larger dealers or wholesalers. Some of these wholesalers then either sell the scrap to "super" wholesalers or process the scrap into usable plastic pellets for manufacturing. 

Perhaps the most interesting recycle-cycle is plastic bags, which are slowly being banned by cities around the world for being non-recyclable. World, take a good look at Pune. One large wholesaler mechanically cleans these bags then processes them into pellets, which are sold to an irrigation company to be melted and molded into drip irrigation pipes. Since the recycled plastic bags are an absurdly cheap material--there is no competing demand for them--the drip pipes are among the cheapest in the world and can be sold at affordable prices to smallholder farmers.

(Actually I still think banning these plastic bags is a good idea. But for cities that are still using them, don't give up hope on them being non-recyclable!)

Waste that does not end up in home trash cans likely ends up in dumpsters or in the streets. This more public garbage is taken care of by the Pune Municipal Corporation, which employs safai karmacharis (cleaning workers) to sweep the streets and empty the dumpsters and then sort all the waste. Organic ("wet") waste is sent to either biogas power plants to supply the city of Pune with electricity or to fertilizer production plants. Recyclable waste goes to recycling processing plants. Non-recyclables mostly go to incinerators or landfills, but Pune has been experimenting with using the waste as syngas fuel for electricity generation.

Large commercial entities such as malls have their own custodial staff who take care of the waste in various ways. Some shopping complexes sell their waste on the scrap market to wholesalers while others send the garbage to major recycling plants.

This whole process is illustrated in the figure I made below (click on the image to enlarge). I'm sorry it's confusing and busy; this is the first time I've attempted to create such a diagram. Two caveats: (1) that process is what ideally happens and (2) that figure excludes the non-unionized waste pickers who go to the landfills to scavenge. A lot of trash slips through the cracks of the system, and the non-unionized waste pickers try to recover some of the valuable recyclable waste that has slipped through. This figure might imply that 100% of recyclables end up recycled, but that's not true. In Pune, almost 50% of plastics end up recycled. But keep in mind that is still extremely high: in the US about 8.2% of recyclable plastics get recycled. (Source.)

Pune's waste cycle. Click on image to enlarge.

Whenever I talk about waste management in India, I like to recall a story from December 2009, when my brother Ben and his friend Joel visited me in Delhi. We went on a trip to northeast India, and on our way back we passed through Kolkata. Ben ate a banana and could not find any trash can to discard his peel. After having seen tons of garbage in the streets (Kolkata can sometimes be particularly dirty), he decided to simply drop the peel where he was standing, in the middle of a plaza. An Indian man came over to Ben and started yelling at him not to throw his trash on the ground. Ben, of course, was exasperated: "Have you seen your streets? You have no right telling me not to litter when you treat your streets like landfills. Everyone else in this filthy city is littering. What am I supposed to do with my trash if there are no trash cans?"

But if you looked around more carefully, you would realize there was not a piece of garbage in the plaza itself--but tons of trash piling up in the streets lining the plaza's border. Street sweepers, like those safai karmacharis in Pune, pick up the trash in the street, but not in the plaza. Thus, Ben should have added his banana peel to an existing pile in the street, rather than dropping it anywhere. However, this is not obvious to an outsider who doesn't know anything about India's waste system and sees waste strewn about in a seemingly indiscriminate way. And really, Ben was right in a sense. It is unhygienic to allow trash to pile up in streets, even if street sweepers or waste pickers will come by later to collect it. Not to mention that it's far from aesthetically or aromatically pleasing.

So yes, the streets of India often appear filthy. When you walk around, you have to watch your feet lest you step in garbage (...or cow dung). But it's important to keep in mind that this littering is part of the waste system, and in fact, putting waste into the hands of professionals, rather than hoping the average citizen can sort his or her waste properly, results in higher recycling rates, as witnessed in Pune.

As I have learned again and again, nothing in India (or anywhere, really) is as it seems on the surface. It's too easy to judge and make assumptions based on first impressions, especially when those impressions are as strong as smelly piles of trash in the street--but those assumptions will almost always be wrong. We have to delve deeper to understand what's actually going on (and we probably still won't fully understand; I certainly have much more to learn!).