With
the Diwali haze turning our air poisonous, a reporter goes on a quest
to find out the challenges of living an eco-friendly urban life
Until
quite recently, a minimum of 40 plastic carry bags would enter my house
every single week as a result of grocery shopping alone. I would say a
more honest assessment for some weeks would be about 70. The math is
simple: On an average, at least 160 such bags in a month, and more than
2,000 in a year, which then served no other purpose than to occasionally
function as garbage bags. Of course, we also had a supply of black
garbage bags.
All of these would eventually find their way into a landfill, most
likely the very spot that is Delhi’s most shameful: a massive landfill
that’s become a large hill at the gateway to the city from the north,
birds of prey circling it at all times of the day, and alongside which
is the city’s largest wholesale market, the Azadpur
, which supplies a large part of the fruits and vegetables that we eat.
We
got home these carry bags even if, on the majority of occasions we went
to the neighbourhood stores, a large shopping bag would be slung across
the shoulder. The instinct of the good shopkeeper’s assistant is to
speedily pack the goods inside the plastic bag while we’re paying up.
And our instinct is to stuff the bag inside our own, with each
additional bag neatly demarcating our purchases, and even keeping our
precious cloth bag clean from the wetness and messiness of vegetables,
if that’s what we were buying.
If,
with some effort, we manage to do away with the convenience of these
carry bags, there are the packaged goods that we are confronted with—in
food alone, there is, for instance, our rice,
, biscuits, oil,
spices or milk. The type of packaging they come in matters; at a
subconscious level, we have come to identify this with the quality of
the product, and known brands have the upper hand here.
However,
reports over recent years from the laboratory of the Centre for Science
and Environment, a New Delhi-based non-profit, alone have suggested how
very wrong this perception may be. While pesticides were found in
well-known brands of honey and soft drinks, the factory-made brands of
bread that are a daily purchase in a majority of Indian households,
including mine, as well as those used in many popular pizza and burger
chains, revealed traces of the chemicals potassium iodate and potassium
bromate, both serious health hazards with carcinogenic properties that
are banned in many countries.
A waste- paper recycling plant in MeerutIn January, a report from the World Economic Forum, the Ellen McArthur Foundation and McKinsey & Co,
The New Plastics Economy: Rethinking The Future Of Plastics,
revealed that “plastics production has surged over the past 50 years,
from 15 million tonnes in 1964 to 311 million tonnes in 2014, and is
expected to double again over the next 20 years”. The report further
found that “95% of plastic packaging material value (which also
represents 26% of the total volume of plastics produced), or $80-120
billion (Rs5.3 trillion) annually, is lost to the economy after a short
first use. More than 40 years after the launch of the first universal
recycling symbol, only 14% of plastic packaging is collected for
recycling”.
Let’s put all these numbers and percentages that your
eyes glazed over in perspective. Since a large volume of plastic waste
leaks into the ocean every year, the World Economic Forum has calculated
that by 2050—which is not a long way off—there will be more plastic in
the ocean than fish.
Disgusted already?
***
For
a few years now, scientists have been raging over a matter of
nomenclature: on whether to call the times we live in the Anthropocene
epoch. This literally means that the activities of human beings have had
a significant and permanent negative impact on Earth’s environment and
climate. It is a remarkably sobering thought that a single species could
have done so much damage.
While
some scientists may argue over the kind of precise evidence required to
announce a new geological era, the fact remains that the arrogance with
which we live, unmindful of other lives on this planet, is evident
everywhere. How frequently do we now read of animals venturing out of
the dwindling forest spaces on to our (a necessary accentuation
in our brain) roads? Of species being choked into extinction? And the
unpredictability of our climate is now so stark as to be the topic of
conversation even in urban drawing rooms. With India responsible for a
4.1% share of global emissions, one can only hope that its ratification
of the Paris Agreement on climate change, just weeks before the 22nd
round of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is
set to take place in Marrekech, Morrocco, from 7-18 November, will lead
to a sincere effort to fulfil its commitments towards its environment
goals.
For the past couple of years, my family has often spoken of
quitting Delhi, which holds the disreputable title of being one of the
top 10 polluted cities in the world. With the monsoon receding and the
return of a permanent haze of smog over the city, this thought once
again flexes its muscle. But if we were to run, where would we run to?
If not the permanently damaged lungs that cough their protest, would not
the pesticide-ridden food continue to trouble us?
As we rush unconcerned towards what seems like self-wrought doom, is there nothing we can do?
***
A plastic-waste recycling plant in MeerutIn a conversation with author Amitav Ghosh this summer, when he published his book
The Great Derangement: Climate Change And The Unthinkable,
he responded to the idea of “being the change you want to see”, of
individual actions that can make a difference, by saying: “Look,
obviously people feel compelled to do something individually, but I
think it’s very important not to capitulate to the view that individuals
can solve this problem. It’s a collective problem; it’s a question of
collective action; we’re talking about a global commons. This whole
neo-liberal sort of push for the last 30-40 years has been towards
trying to reduce everything towards individual actions and initiatives.
In fact, it prevents the whole imagining of problems in terms that are
amenable to collective action. In that sense, I would say that every
time we meet this question of individual initiatives, we should just
turn away from it; we should refuse to succumb to that logic. How are
you or I, for example, going to solve the question of how much water is
withdrawn from the Upper Ganga acquifer? We can’t.”
He’s correct, of course. And, as he points out, we no longer have the luxury of time.
However,
it’s also a fact that the problems have come too close to home. However
far removed concepts like Anthropocene or melting glaciers may seem,
it’s impossible for any one of us to turn away from this toxic mess of
our own making, affecting every aspect of our lives, from the food we
eat to the air we breathe. Last winter, even as designer air masks
started emerging in the Delhi market, a notification from my children’s
school left me aghast. It recommended that we take the precaution of
sending the children to school wearing air masks. I don’t know whether I
was more horrified at this apparent panic on the part of the school
authorities or the conditions that had led to it. What was this sci-fi
existence? When it is the children at risk, naturally you agonize more.
***
An e-waste recycling plant in Haridwar. Photographs by Pradeep Gaur/MinSo, what could I do?
I
set myself the challenge of attempting to live in a way that would
cause the least hurt to the environment. But considering the scale of
the problem, this is an overwhelming question to consider. Did I even
have the time among all the many things I was already juggling? Didn’t I
need the support of my family too? Would I now need to expend energy
trying to convince them? Organic food, LED bulbs, compost bins,
menstrual cups—all these things that might bring a “difference” would
make an immediate dent in my budget. In a city like Delhi that is so
unsafe for women, walking the streets or using certain forms of public
transport past a certain hour would only make me uneasy. In any case,
would I make any difference at all? Where do I even begin?
But as I
realized over just a few weeks, the mere act of being alert to my
every action highlighted so many that are easily reversible. It is a
process that can surprise you. Once you start, you begin to question
every single thing—from the toothpaste with the antibacterial agent
triclosan that you’re spitting down the drain and which is toxic to
marine life, to the coffee in every disposable cup that you drink at
your workspace. The volumes of paper towels that I use to dry my hand in
the washroom—wouldn’t the air drier that
nobody uses, or better
still, a handkerchief brought from home, be better? Discarding the
plastic stirrer used to dissolve sugar into my coffee or the thermocol
plates to eat in, reducing the sheer wastage of paper used for printing,
travelling with a bottle of water in order to avoid purchases of PET
bottles, making my own
reetha shampoo—all these were achievable fairly easily and without much fuss.
***There
are several websites that I went to with quizzes that tell you the
extent of your carbon footprint and how to reduce it. Some gave
solutions from the simple and doable to the truly complicated. I laughed
at the concept of eating local—the most local I could get, in my very
neighbourhood in fact, were the crops grown on the Yamuna river’s toxic
floodplains. I patted myself on the back for having started the move to
LED bulbs; being the tyrant at my home, pouncing at all electricity
switches that needed to be turned off; being a habitual bucket-bath
person rather than a wasteful shower one; for having slowly started
replacing all plastic
dabbas in the kitchen with steel, glass and
ceramic; for making the daily commute on the Metro rather than a
private vehicle; or for even having already started to segregate waste
at home. At the same time, I flinched at reports of the environmental
impact of the meat we eat, but couldn’t bring myself to think of a diet
free from it; or the diesel vehicle we have at home—and thankfully the
unmanageable traffic situation has ensured that it stays parked most of
the time—that we couldn’t afford to change at the moment.
The birth of her children, the conception even, was a
turning point in her life. She questioned the need for frequent
ultrasounds, the birthing process followed in hospitals, the necessity
of vaccinations, even conventional wisdom on when one should stop
breastfeeding babies. For the purposes of this story, we shall skip to a
point when she decided to give her toddler watermelon juice in a
bottle. The nipple remained stained red for days afterwards, bringing to
the fore everything she’d been sensing for a while, but which had been
more convenient to ignore. “What kind of world were we leaving behind
for them? It scared me,” she says. She now grows organic vegetables and
medicinal plants, both on the roof of her home, as well as with children
in her school. Their experiments on the school grounds have been so
successful that the excess vegetables are distributed to the children to
take home, in the process making a small community of parents a little
bit more aware of the poison on their dinner plates. In Waldorf schools,
gardening usually starts from grade 3, she says, but at Ukti they
decided to start off even earlier. “In a city like Delhi, we are so far
removed (from the situation), nobody is aware or doing anything. The
next generation has to be made aware,” she says.
My generation
grew up with parents who lived a more sustainable life, if only because
the choices so headily offered by our post-liberalized marketplace
simply did not exist then. If I don’t know how to segregate my waste—the
organic wet, the paper and plastic waste that can be recycled if kept
dry, batteries and broken tubelights that make up toxic waste, and the
non-recyclables like sanitary napkins and diapers that go into
landfills—it’s because I have never seen anyone do it. Does anyone even
know that according to government rules it is mandatory for every
household and every office to segregate their waste? Or that brands and
manufacturers of plastic packaging are obliged to set up a system take
them back from consumers? I most certainly didn’t.
Deepak Sethi,
the co-founder and chief executive officer of Pom Pom Recycling Pvt.
Ltd, a waste management service in Delhi that buys your dry waste and
sends it to authorized recycling plants, believes that the most
important challenge where waste management is concerned is to create a
behavioural change. From making it compulsory education in every class
at school, to enforcing it strictly in each office so that employees
start getting habituated to it and can replicate the example at their
homes, from making an example of it at every government office that
invites vast volumes of visitors, to creating a standardized design for
different bins for different categories of waste that people would start
identifying with—Sethi believes that every person needs to learn, and
to be taught, to manage their waste by themselves. Pom Pom itself
conducts frequent awareness workshops in schools.
If you go on to the
website of Pom Pom or even Daily Dump, a design-based solution to waste
that is based in Bengaluru, one notices an attempt to redefine the
language used around waste—it’s wealth, it’s valuable, not dirty or
garbage. In our country, where caste-defined roles are so entrenched in
mindsets, we are comfortable with the sight of little children knee deep
in municipal dumps sifting through the waste, but shun the idea of
doing away with this indignity of labour or even saving resources by
sorting the waste at source, at our own home.
Garden Estate, a
residential society in Gurgaon, near Delhi, says it has reduced 55% of
the waste (225kg per day) that was going into landfills by the simple
act of introducing a community composting project. Keshav Chander Jaini,
the resident who introduced the idea in the society, says that since
February, when the composting began, they have managed to sell 3,000kg
of compost. This has been picked up by Edible Routes, a consultancy
service that guides people on growing organic vegetables in their own
space, whether it’s a balcony, terrace or farm. While 20% of the waste
from the society is now going into landfills, Jaini says they hope to
take steps to reduce it further to 10%, besides taking the initiative to
deal separately with e-waste, empower waste pickers, and other aspects.
The Garden Estate story is important. After all, as Poonam Bir
Kasturi, founder of PBK Waste Solutions Pvt. Ltd, which runs Daily Dump,
states, “This is the crisis of our times.” It’s a small initiative in a
gated colony that shows it’s not impossible for India to replicate the
example set by Austria in becoming a zero-landfill country.
How
much have I achieved in this past month? Very, very little, I’m afraid.
So much of my time has been spent battling excuses, struggling with my
inhibitions. And yet, I know that I haven’t failed; every single day
now, I notice new, and surprisingly small, ways to do things
differently. The first step to change, as Zutshi reminds me, is to
become aware; to realize the impact things have.
Once
you start trying, she says, it’s unlikely to leave the people around
you untouched. And I know for one that ever since we started discussing
this story, my immediate neighbour at my workspace has started puzzling
the Dunkin’ Donut staff in the building by thrusting his own mug towards
them instead of accepting their disposable coffee cup. Of course, since
it would then be unethical to accept their plastic stirrer, he’s been
deprived of sugar in his coffee.
***
What the new waste management rules say
This
year, the central government notified new rules for a more efficient
waste management system. If followed in all sincerity, it could truly
lead to a Swachh Bharat. However, for that to happen, there needs to
first be a concerted awareness programme. Here are some key rules that
you should pay attention to:
1. Source segregation of waste mandatory, whether at
individual homes, gated communities or offices and institutions, in order to more efficiently reuse and recycle.
2.
New townships and housing societies to develop in-house waste
handling, as well as processing arrangement for biodegradable waste.
3.
Producers, importers and brand owners of plastic and non-recyclable
packaging and e-waste responsible for introducing a collect back
system.
4. Increase thickness of plastic carry bags from 40 to 50
microns, thus increasing the cost by 20 %. The hope is to deter the
distribution of free carry bags.
5. Phasing out the manufacture of all non-recyclable multilayered packaging within two years.
6. Every person responsible for organising an event in open space shall segregate and manage the waste.
