Wet and dry

India has the reputation of being quite a dirty country, and in many ways this is deserved.  On other hand, they are far more meticulous than we in the west about such issues as washing one’s hands, not bringing dirt inside on shoes, etc. And since 2016, it has been mandatory for households to sort their rubbish.

However, the behaviour on the streets is not so strictly regimented.  Every morning, I see lots of people carefully sweeping the roadsides and the pavements (not that there is much in the way of distinction between the two); even though these are dirt roads, they are spotless.  The leaves, dirt and litter is swept into small piles, and these are then put into a hand-cart.  And this cart is then pulled to what is presumably a designated spot at the side of the road somewhere away from houses, and emptied out into a much larger pile.  And what happens to these?  Nothing, so far as I can tell, though they are picked over by wandering cows.  And since these piles do not appear to get to an unmanageable size, I suppose they must be collected by trucks eventually, and taken to… a much, much bigger pile.  Or dump.

One has seen filmed footage of such places, with scavengers, bird, rodent and human, picking through them for anything that might prove of use: old batteries, disposable razors, bits of food still in some sort of condition to be eaten…  Plus plastic, metal, card etc for recycling – all worth real money.  India is a country of levels: castes, obviously, but also divided on economic levels, and these people seem to be at the very bottom on both counts.

On the other hand, in many ways we have a valuable lesson to learn from India, and other developing countries.  Val has recently been doing some risk management work with a waste management company, or authority, or something in the UK, and has learnt that almost their biggest problem is food waste contaminating general waste.  And vice versa: if food waste could be separated from other contamination, it can be worth a lot of money (turned into biogas to generate electricity).

India deals with one half of this problem by dividing all waste very simply into wet and dry.  At our apartment, rubbish is collected, every day if necessary, from our front door… provided it is separated in this way.  Public bins too are labelled in such a way, and my impression is that there is greater observance of this simple rule than in the UK, with its rather confusing labelling; if one feels that it doesn’t matter, since no-one else observes the rule, it is self-fulfilling, and will all go to landfill.

But the real question about recycling is not how it is collected – from our parents’ one bin for everything to the US’s apparent sorting into eight or nine different categories – but what happens to it then.  I am sure that India handles the dry stuff very well.  They have an army of people – several armies – of unofficial waste pickers prepared to sort carefully through it all, separating it into different types, all sellable.

The wet stuff?  Judging by the piles of decaying matter seen all over the place, if the cows don’t want it, it gets left.  And rots eventually, I suppose.   But increasingly, the  municipalities are being required to turn it into energy.