Trash Trade Transformation

Serious issues & more serious requirements

As per an estimate, there are about 39 million people (3% of national population of India) who are directly / indirectly associated with the handling & management of all types of wastes, whether MSW, Hazardous, Bio Medical, E-waste, Water and all other wet & dry waste. These workers include rag pickers, kabadies, scrap merchants, municipal employees, contract labors, waste management teams in the formal sector etc., who may be known by various other names in our country.

Most of these ‘Waste Workers’ are uneducated, low paid, low profiled, work under unhygienic conditions, spend close to about 35-40% of their income on medical expenses, live a shorter than average life, their children hardly goes to formal education and female members are the worst sufferers in the process. 

It is not out of place to remind that, waste management is the largest industry / activity in true sense, because whatever we produce becomes waste at one or the other point of time. It is equally true that, quantity, weight & volume of waste generation / production is the highest, even than 3% of the population manages waste of 100%. It is also equally important to note that, one’s waste is other’s raw material to reproduce fresh material for our consumption. 

During my association with the waste management industry since 2005, I can safely share that to achieve the maximum success, we need to implement the following: 

Training of waste workers: There is a strong need to introduce Safety, Health, Environment & Regulatory (SHER) aspects to these workers during their skill development program for the respective roles. Our company Ecoreco Enviro Education Pvt Ltd is working in partnership with NSDC on a target to train 300,000 waste workers on the above subject to provide environment friendly waste management. To achieve required results, it is very important that government / corporations / social impact funds provide grant / use CSR funds for trainings / skill development of present and prospective waste workers. It is also equally important that such funds or direct incentive is extended to these workers to pay their fees for skill development according to their respective roles. 

Transport of trash (Reverse Logistic & Warehousing Network): Second most important requirement in waste management is to set up collection centers, collection bins, and reverse logistic network across nation to aggregate and transport accumulated waste for treatment and disposal. The trained / skilled persons will run these collection centers and reverse logistic network. To provide financial support, banks & financial institutions, CSR, Social Impact Funds, or other such similar institutions must come forward to extend loan / grant on case to case basis or adopt collection centers for seamless collection and transportation to the recycling / waste management facilities. 

Technology for environment friendly disposal: Unfortunately, in the present time, these Kabadies (informal workers) are not sorting / dismantling or recovering valuable material from the wastes in an environment friendly manner and that is the major cause of pollution & health hazards. To overcome that, first of all these trained / skilled army of waste workers should be restricted to do polluting activities and secondly government must provide concessional land / funds / subsidy / tax benefits / grants etc. to the recycling & waste management facilities to motivate them to invest in these facilities otherwise the country may not achieve desired results and gradually we may see the return of informal market because of economic reasons. 

For the best recovery and environment friendly disposal of all kinds of waste, waste management rules alone may not be enough until there is no financial support for setting up infrastructure and viability gap funding is not in place. 

We at Ecoreco Group are completely committed to the environment friendly disposal of waste and available at your disposal to implement the above model with the Government’s support. 

We believe in uplifting of our existing waste workers rather than uprooting