Scaling our Waste Mountains – Fixing solid waste in India’s cities

Solid waste affects everyone at an individual, community and public level.

With India’s per capita, per day waste generation estimated at 0.6 kg, and notwithstanding industrial solid waste generation, solid waste management (SWM) is a daily million-ton problem for India – and it is projected to increase.

As we try to make good on economic goals – India’s demographic, migratory, consumption and waste patterns are changing. India continues to urbanize, and its cities face compounding challenges in waste management due to increasing population, limited space, overburdened systems, and vast socio-economic disparities.

Amidst rapid urbanization, only 26% of urban areas are covered by waste management systems deployed by municipal bodies.

The cascading effects of this gap are for all to see – openly dumped garbage, waste mountains in decades-old landfills, polluted land and waterbodies, breakdown in public health, and stagnating neighborhoods.

This report takes a deep dive into solid waste management in India’s cities, with a focus on the human dimension of SWM, and the roles and challenges of three of these actors: Urban Local Bodies, Informal Waste Workers, and Citizens.

At the frontier of this problem is a diverse ecosystem, composed of various formal and informal actors, including:

• Central government ministries and agencies 
• State governments 
• Urban local bodies 
• Waste management companies 
• Informal recycling agencies 
• Independent informal waste workers 
• Non-Government Organizations and Civil Society Organizations
• Academics and research institutions 
• Citizens

We find that while their challenges are tied to hyper local contexts, there are some universal linkages in their experience of Solid Waste Management

Beyond these three stakeholders, we have also looked at and amplified the pathbreaking work of NGOs whose interventions have solved for several intersecting challenges in SWM, from the individual to the community, and more broadly the local – affecting lasting change and quantum leaps in quality of life, livelihoods, public health and wellbeing, and greater environmental health.

Based on our research, key cornerstones that can support such interventions and stakeholders are: 

• Strengthening citizen ownership, action, and accountability towards SWM by focusing on knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. This has the potential to reduce landfilling by up to 90%, costs attached to waste collection and processing by 50% and generate resources from recycling and upcycling. 
• Securing dignity, equity, and safety for workers and their families by enabling formal recognition, social protection, and diverse livelihood opportunities. This catalyses the reversal of multigenerational poverty, enables safer working conditions, and creates a ripple change in under-resourced communities. 
• Leveraging local administrations as champions of SWM by equipping them with greater technical, social, and financial knowledge, resources, and decision-making. This inspires innovation in SWM, enables scale, and achieves sustained transformation. 
• Developing capital infrastructure which prioritizes hyper-local contexts, financial and administrative needs. »Fostering consultative planning, policy action, and targets for every stakeholder by deploying a rigorous framework. 
• Converging intervention pathways at the national level by fostering collaboration, consultation, and SWM consciousness in development plans and agendas

As we grapple with our own consumption and waste practices, it is vital to understand our local SWM systems, the humans behind these systems, and our role in the transformations we wish to see. While waste mountains represent several inconvenient truths about cities, we need to come together to get the wheels of true, just, and sustainable circularity turning. This report concludes with the following recommendations:

For State and Civil Society 

• Set up pan-India alliances for SWM 
• Bolster data driven ULB empowerment 
• Innovate to move away from toxic materials 
• Build fair and inclusive compliance mechanisms 
• Focus on bulk waste generators 
• Design intersectoral programmes spotlighting climate and workers in waste management 
• Bolster flexible, supportive, and co-creative partnerships for circularity

For Citizens 

• Segregate waste at source 
• Work cooperatively with Resident Welfare Associations (RWA) and waste workers 
• Hold governments accountable for waste management 

For Funders 

• Fund innovations and develop integrated projects 
• Strengthen collaborative action between funders and governments 
• Support human centered intervention