Waste Management in India: A Nice Report and an Important Blog

In this Article on Global View of Waste Management, the Author Antonis Mavropoulos, STC Chair of ISWA writes about WTERT's research
********

Source:  (Daniel Berehulak - AFP/Getty Images)

I am sure that all of you are familiar with the new role and the importance of India in the current global landscape.

I would say that from a sustainability point of view, the future of waste management in India is an issue with global importance and impacts, rather than a typical national or local aspect. The same is also true about China, but this is an issue for a next post.

I found some very interesting figures which I would like to share with you.

50% is the increase in MSW generated within a decade since 2001. In a “business as usual scenario”, urban India will generate 160.5 million tons per year or 440.000 tons per day by 2041!

Within next ten years India will generate a total of 920 million tons of MSW! Almost 91% of it will be landfilled (hopefully) or driven to dumpsites!

Speaking only for the city of Mumbai, open burning of solid wastes and landfill fires emit nearly 22,000 tons of pollutants per year! Open burning was found to be the largest single polluter in Mumbai!  

So where did I find those impressive figures? Searching for India waste management at the web I discovered a Columbia University researcher, Ranjith Kharvel Annepu who has a blog which contains a lot of useful data and methodological approaches. It is at http://swmindia.blogspot.com/ and I am sure that you will enjoy it.

After some days I noticed that Ranjith has uploaded a recent (January 2012) and very well elaborated report with the title “Sustainable Solid Waste Management in India”. It is written by him and supervised by professor Themelis in Columbia University Earth Engineering Center. Allow me to congratulate both of them for this piece of work.  

You can find the whole report here

It is a valuable piece of information if you are looking for waste management in India. And I would say that the report faces the informal sector issues with respect and creativity, avoiding the usual misleading conflict between thermal treatment and informal sector. In that way, it may be useful from a global view as well.