Proper waste management can not only clean the country but give good returns. It can save national resources and check rising landfill sites
He also warns that landfills are no solution to process and decompose the solid waste generated globally as well as locally. The solid waste industry (yes, waste is a big-time industry now) contributes 5 per cent of all global greenhouse gas emissions-more than the entire shipping and aviation industries combined. As it decomposes, rubbish produces methane, a potent greenhouse gas that traps many times more heat than carbon dioxide. Landfills ooze leachate (a noxious black or yellow sludge that forms from putrefying rubbish) which has acids, heavy metals, polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxins and other poisons and carcinogens which can leak down into the water table or rivers and our water supply.
What is mind boggling is the way the author has chronicled China’s growth as a dumping yard of developed countries and her subsequent growth as a global economic power using that waste as raw materials. Between 1988 and 2018, nearly half-47 per cent- of all plastic waste exported worldwide was sent to China for recycling. “Then in 2018, China shut its doors. Under a new policy, “National Sword”, the Chinese government prohibited almost all foreign waste from entering the country, arguing that what was coming in was too contaminated and that the environmental damage was too great.”
Learning from China’s experience many countries enacted laws banning plastic waste but it has not made any difference. The rubbish keeps on coming to India. The author’s account of his trip to Ghazipur near Delhi should send alarm bells across the corridors of power in the national capital. Despite not being the country’s largest landfill, the amount of plastic waste reaching the yard has grown manifold. According to him, the Deonar landfill near Mumbai is the country’s largest landfill.
What is significant about the book is that the author, who has lambasted the current Indian political leadership for terrorizing the Muslims and migrant workers from other countries who come as rag pickers are facing growing persecution amid an alarming rise in Hindutva nationalism. “Hindu politicians have openly called for violence, and the expulsion of Muslims from the country, something unthinkable even a decade ago,” he says after his visit to Ghazipur. India, which is all set to host the G-20 summit later this year may have to work overtime to clean up this muck called solid waste dumping yards from its backyards. Many industries could use plastic waste to generate products that are very much in demand in Europe and US. This is what the Chinese did with the waste it imported till 2018. “By 2016, the US alone was sending 1,500 shipping containers full of waste to China every day. By recycling the West’s waste instead of using virgin equivalent China prevented the emissions of carbon dioxide and the extraction of billion tons of ore. It was from the waste sent to their country, the Chinese emerged as the electronic manufacturing powerhouse. Most of the nouveau riche in China made it big through the waste recycling industry.
Proper use of plastic waste could take India to new heights. But do not forget that there are many Brahmapurams all over India which could cause irreparable damage to the population and natural resources including air and water. There is enough “gold” to be made out of these Wastelands.
(The writer is a special correspondent with The Pioneer. The views are personal
