‘The inevitable becomes intolerable the moment it is perceived as no longer inevitable’
                                                                                                                                   Tocqueville

Since the advent of mankind, man has been busy using the resources provided by nature. His exploitation, adventures or activities have only exacerbated in the last few centuries.

After the great revolution, the industrial growth has been phenomenal. Sadly, at the same time, there has been an exponential increase in industrial wastage and pollution. From the times of Adam Smith (laissez-faire) till today’s neo-liberal world order, the drive has been for free exploitation of earth’s resources for a broader economy, and the efforts have been unidirectional, i.e., ‘dump the old, create the new, forget the sustainability but exploit the whole, ignoring the waste’.

Waste has always been the shadow side of the economy. In production and consumption, it is that which is rejected as ‘useless’ and ‘barren’. Whatever the word (garbage, rubbish, refuse, waste), and whichever the language, the meaning is similar.

But where there has been muck, there has always been money. Both farms and quarries use waste as a resource. Farmers spread muck on their fields. Quarries use rubble to landscape the land they have blasted. Plastic is used in eco-friendly roads. Copper is obtained from burning PVC wires. Gold is recovered from waste through acid treatment… These crude methods have surely generated wealth but apart from being harmful to one’s health, these activities remain unorganised, unplanned and discrete.

Creating wealth from waste involves consumers and people at the household level as active participants in the entire process and points towards a new form of citizenship, which believes in justiciable fundamental duties. The idea that production and consumption are being re-united through individuals’ experiences is now spreading far and wide.

The drivers of change are the growing concerns about the hazards of waste disposal, broader environmental concerns, especially global warming and resource depletion and economic opportunities created by new waste regulations and technological innovation.

For developing countries, recycling of waste is the most economically viable option available, in terms of employment generation for the urban poor with no skills and investment. Recycling is a low technology, labour intensive service, marginalised by the nature of its trade and traditions, working at the margins of health regulations and is below the radar line of the stock market.

There is a requirement for a holistic framework for recycling the waste, which not only needs innovation in technology domain, but also scalable and replicable efforts for involving the community at large. Recycling needs skilled and organised frontline collectors, planned management with techniques like MIS/PERT/CPM and innovations at designing and manufacturing levels. We can start with the consumer as the basic waste generator and then move back up the pipe.

The starting point for recycling systems has to be where retailing ends: the household. Intensive recycling would require households to segregate their wastes into organics, dry recyclables and residual waste, supplemented by periodic collections of a fourth stream of durable goods and hazardous items.

Once segregated, baled and dispatched, the next stage of the process lies with the manufacturers. The processing sectors have the specialist knowledge to convert recovered materials into useable inputs: how to take ink off old newsprint or recover tin from tin cans. Materials that are expensive or impossible to recycle, such as multi-layer packaging (e.g., tetra packs), can be redesigned to lengthen their lives as also to ease recycling.

In future, increased recovery of materials will generate innovations downstream: reconverting materials and developing new products that can use the materials again. Could Coca Cola use returnable plastic bottles (which they do)? Would Airtel reduce services charges if you opt for e-bills (which it does)? The goals of recyclability and making more with less become the driving forces of change within the system and are reinforced by increased consumer awareness.

Waste should no longer be seen as a cost and an economic drain on productive resources. It has to become a source of innovation. Like energy, it shall be contributing to a profound restructuring of the international economy. In managing this process, public policy has a central place.

Rather than controlling or managing such activity from the centre, public authorities must shape, guide and stimulate it. The government has to take a broad view across the whole system and come up with innovative ideas, think about giving incentives at the household level for segregating the waste in different dustbins, especially e-waste; subsidies for source level waste treatment units; put up local plastic and dry waste shredding systems; and hence, help organise the market.

Man needs to learn to use the resources in a sustainable way; surely, he should fear for future growth but not at the expenses of the coming generations. We have till now ignored the waste economy and overlooked the magnitude of the problem due to wastage; the situation may not be as sad as it seems and requirement may not be as urgent as it is believed, but then, it will never be. Also, we cannot quietly accept the dictat that the phenomenon, if not useless, is inevitable. q