Waste of a Nation: Garbage and Growth in India by Assa Doron

Author:Assa Doron [Doron, Assa]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780674980600
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2018-03-25T18:30:00+00:00

Fig. 7.1 Roofed processing center for separating dry and wet waste and making compost and refuse-derived fuel at Thippenahalli, Bengaluru. Photo © Robin Jeffrey, 2015.

Fig. 7.2 Extracting compost, refuse-derived fuel, plastic, metal, and paper from a neglected dumping ground in Raichur, Karnataka. Photo © Robin Jeffrey, 2015.

At a smoothly working site, these side effects could be controlled, but this was impossible when a center was faced with huge quantities of mixed waste. Garbage generation does not take holidays. Waste piles up and becomes more noxious every day. In Bengaluru, waste treatment centers faced this problem of accumulating loads of unsuitable mixed waste. Nearby villagers, troubled by the detritus escaping from dozens of garbage trucks and worried by the arrival of crafty property developers looking to acquire cheap land, protested. “The contractors [running a new waste processing center] … should have taken the villagers into confidence,” lamented a Bengaluru municipal official questioned about protests, “and shown them that the processing plant is safe and bad smell will not spread.”23 His forlorn remark—“should have taken the villagers into confidence”—underlined the relationships, cooperation, and person-to-person communication needed to make waste-management plans work.

Prince at Thippenahalli was an engineer, but during his time in Coimbatore, he had had to dabble in agricultural extension. Composting puts biodegradable materials back into the ecosystem and prevents wet waste from merely rotting in space-gobbling landfills. But there is no purpose in turning wet waste into compost if no one wants it, and a waste processing center does not have the space to store hundreds of bags of spurned compost. To farmers, the compost often seems both old-fashioned and, if it comes from a suspect waste processing center, newfangled. Farmers have bought chemical fertilizers at subsidized prices for years and are accustomed to its predictable results. “In Coimbatore,” Prince said, “we conducted a program for the local farmers. We gave them the samples [of our compost]—forty kgs or a hundred kgs—free samples. They used it for a particular area of their farm, and the particular area got a very good growth compared to the other areas of their farm.” He explained further: “We had to teach them. We had a particular five acres for demonstration [of types of crops grown around Coimbatore]. We only used our manure.… They come to know through practical things. Farmers … are open-minded now. More than 50 percent … turned to our manure.”24 Success required not merely well-funded and designed facilities but also the ability of professionals to take “the villagers into confidence.”

The need for advocacy is inescapable. The compost produced in centers like the ones in Bengaluru has to compete with the chemical fertilizers subsidized since the 1960s as part of the green revolution. In some areas, peasants might once have been keen to tap the degradable waste of nearby towns. But those habits have slipped away and been replaced by harmful overuse of chemical fertilizer. Advocates of compost from waste processing centers argue that the price of chemical fertilizers should be raised and

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