Trash talks: Here’s why segregating your garbage is so important

It’s not an uncommon sight (or smell) — trucks overflowing with garbage and spreading the stench of part of the city’s 4,000 tonnes of waste on its way to a landfill which, in most cases, is Jawahar Nagar. But what if, instead of dumping all of that waste, we had a way to recycle or reuse at least 90 per cent of it? With the Telangana State government recently announcing that it will start distributing wet and dry waste bins to homes in the city, the practise of waste segregation could and should soon become our daily routine.

“Say we generate about one kilo of waste every day for a family of four,” says Naresh Rayikanti, a freelance video editor and waste segregation advocate, “It’s mixed waste — 60 per cent is bio-degradable, 30 per cent is glass, tin, plastic, etc., which is recyclable and about 10 per cent is medicinal waste.” But what would we do with segregated waste? Naresh says that most of the dry waste can be given to neighbourhood kabbadiwallahs, while wet waste can be used to create organic compost.

Using a product known as a khamba, all of your kitchen and wet waste can be composted. Venkat Reddy, operations head at the Hyderabad Goes Green store that sells these khambas, says, “People can put both dry and wet waste, except for things that are not bio-degradable — chicken bones, rotten food, coffee dredges, vegetable peels... pretty much everything we eat can be put in. After a certain period of time, maggots form in the composter and they feed on the waste which decomposes it into manure that is 10 times richer than even vermicompost.”

The practise is becoming fast prevalent in the city, with Venkat Reddy claiming that so far, it’s kitchen gardeners and younger “responsible” couples taking it up seriously. One of those families is Sandeep Sonti, who actually gave up his full-time job to promote the practise of segregation and composting though his start-up Waste2Organic. “Living in a gated community of about 2,000 homes, we saw that it has most resources in place, but the waste that is collected all just gets dropped opposite the building. It shows that we don’t take responsibility of what we’re throwing out,” Sandeep says.

And what does taking up this responsibility mean for the city on the whole? Stopping pollution of all kinds, says Srujana Srivatsav, another waste segregation advocate: “Because we don’t have a separation mechanism here, half of the waste — which includes the hazardous bio-medical waste — is burnt. When you dump the garbage in one area, it releases methane, acid and liquids (called leachate) which gets in to the underground water. So you’re releasing greenhouse gases into the air and polluting the land and the water.”
Sandeep adds that all we need is a little bit of effort and awareness. “How in every hospital there are three bins that denote the types of waste, there should be likewise in every home and street.”