The year 2020 has opened a Pandora’s Box of natural and man-made disasters for the world. Most of these are a consequence of utter callousness and negligence by humankind.
Rapid urbanization and industrialization have led to the exploitation of limited natural resources and land. It has also led to severe pollution problems. As a result of this, efficient solid waste management is one of the greatest challenges the world faces today.
Solid waste management could be described as the collection, treatment, and disposal of generated waste.
A better understanding of waste and keeping abreast with the latest technologies allows us to efficient waste management by reusing, recycling, and upcycling solid waste.
Despite all the available technologies, there are several challenges faced for effective solid waste management like, administration, social problems, and financial sustenance.
With the uncontrolled rise of industrialization and human population, the rate of waste generation has grown exponentially.
Over the past few decades, any material that served its purpose would be disposed of without a second thought and eventually end up at a municipal dumping site – unsegregated.
This lack of segregation and appropriate disposal/treatment has led us to one of the greatest crises we face today.
So how do we tackle the Goliath that is solid waste management today?
Currently, many countries seek innovative solid waste management strategies that are low cost, easy to implement, decentralized, effective, and can be implemented with ease in the existing situation.
Not just this, all solid waste management strategies must be able to cope with and accommodate the possibility that waste generation may still keep increasing in the future.
With rapid urbanization and archaic solid waste management strategies, the country is facing a massive solid waste management challenge.
India has a population of roughly 1.3 billion out of which nearly 440 million people live in urban localities. A cumulative total of 62 million tonnes of municipal solid waste is being generated in India per annum.
Only 43 million tonnes (MT) of the waste is collected out of which a staggering 75% of segregated waste is dumped in landfill sites.
The honourable Prime Minister’s ‘Swacch Bharat Abhiyaan’ aims to drive the country’s citizens, municipalities, and industries towards being more environmentally responsible and encouraging them to move towards sustainable waste management.
Solid Waste Management (SWM) today is an intrinsic component of keeping our cities, towns, and villages clean.
However, the biggest obstacle in this system is the lack of discipline in waste segregation the most critical component in ensuring the rapid conversion of landfill garbage into composted material.
Poor waste segregation has led to rapid saturation of landfilling sites, along with a plethora of related issues.
Improper solid waste management is known to have a plethora of environmental impacts, but apart from that, it also has health and financial impacts as well.
The usual practice of waste disposal at landfill sites is unloading waste and piling it up till there is no further space available.
We have understood how inefficient solid waste management can impact our health and environment and incur financial loss.
It becomes necessary to operate the allocated landfill site efficiently to minimize health risks, make the process cost-effective, and increase the capacity of landfill and resource recovery at a much higher rate.
Decentralized segregation and disposal of waste come first and foremost when one thinks of any solid waste strategy.
The biggest hindrance in societies today is the lack of willingness to do something so simple and straightforward.
If every person could efficiently segregate and reuse, upcycle, recycle, and reduce their own waste, it would only be a matter of time before our waste management woes would be halved!
Currently, municipal bodies in India have begun enforcing compulsory segregation of waste and have encouraged people to handle their own biodegradable waste. Read more about this here.
Landfills are the most basic solid waste management strategies that have been used for the past few decades. However, poor and ignorant implementation of this strategy has had disastrous consequences for most countries.
The reasons for failure range from inappropriate allocation of land to exponential increase in garbage dumped every day. The greatest reason, however, is the non-segregation of waste.
Waste can basically be divided into two categories:
There are various waste fractions generated from different sources and different activities. These are primarily divided into organic and non-organic waste.
The entire premise of effective solid waste management is based on the effective segregation of waste.
The waste fraction that is biodegradable is known as organic, like food and kitchen waste, garden waste, market waste, food industries, wood processing, agricultural waste, etc., and the waste that is non-biodegradable is known as non-organic waste, like construction waste, health care waste, e-waste, plastic waste, metal waste, etc.
From the perspective of the global solid waste management outlook, it is evident that countries with high per capita income tend to have increased waste generation while developing countries tend to generate less waste.
Hence it is clear that urbanization, lifestyle, and high income level have some influence on the quantum of waste generation.
The treatment process for waste fraction depends on the type of waste. In many countries, organic waste generation can be as low as 50% of municipal waste generation to as high as 80% of it in developing countries.
The load of organic waste, moisture content, and density of waste is higher in countries with low per capita incomes when compared to countries with high per capita incomes, whereas the consumption of paper, plastic, and packaging waste is much higher in high-income countries.
Municipal waste is a mixture of organic and non-organic waste. The source of the waste also varies between residential waste, industrial waste, commercial waste, construction and demolition waste, agriculture, and biomedical waste.
Organic / Biodegradable waste – waste from food preparations, vegetables, flowers, dry leaves, grass clippings, tree branches, animal waste, fish waste, and Agriculture waste.
The three factors that govern the success of a sanitary landfill are its Location, construction, and land distribution.
It is estimated that almost seven to ten billion tons of waste is generated per year around the world.
The rate of resource consumption is directly proportional to waste generation. The three steps towards efficient solid waste management are reduce, reuse, and recycle.
Firstly reduce the production of waste wherever possible, reuse whatever can be used again, or recycle the nonusable waste to valuable products.
An efficient solid waste management strategy can be described as one where the maximum treatment of biodegradable waste is carried out in cohesion with recycling & upcycling of generated non-biodegradable waste.
The second important step towards better solid waste management is Reuse. Over the past few decades, there has been a lot of advancement in packaging technologies.
The greatest negative, however, has been that most of this packaging has not been made with 58/intent of reuse or recycling. Today, a global solid waste management crisis looms over our heads.
Companies are investing in rethinking their packaging such that it can be reused or recycled. Another nifty trick that can come in handy is if people learn to upcycle their waste.
Upcycling is creating something new from an object that has ceased to be of use or value in its current form.
Not only will this reduce the burden on our landfills, it will reduce the burden on recycling facilities as well.
Organic solid waste management technologies require immediate addressing as tackling this fraction of waste can help the burden on solid waste management municipal bodies. Some well-known technologies for biodegradable solid waste management are
There are various pros and cons of each solid waste management methodology, varying from the type and quantum of waste that can be treated to the energy and time consumed.
Read on to find out more about the various options available.
Biological treatment in solid waste management entails the use of living organisms to degrade organic biodegradable waste. The various methods are
Composting technology is a process where organic waste is decomposed by microorganisms under controlled conditions to obtain a nutrient-rich product known as compost.
This compost can be used as an excellent soil amendment product, which improves the quality of topsoil used for gardening and farming.
Composting helps in creating a valuable product from waste, reduces the volume of garbage directed towards municipal landfills, reduces the risk of vector-borne epidemics, helps conserve natural resources, and is one of the most valuable solid waste management strategies that shows a lot of flexibility in implementation.
Composting is one of the few solid waste management strategies that can be implemented at individual, community, and city levels.
Different composting processes can be implemented as part of a city’s solid waste management strategies are carried out based on the type of waste and volume of the waste.
Types of Composting Technologies being employed as part of Biological Solid Waste Management
Since the initiation of mandatory composting as a solid waste management strategy in cities and towns, people have employed the following technologies :
The advantages and disadvantages of these methods are described below:
Traditional pits are probably the first known methods of composting carried out as a part of solid waste management. The greatest advantage of the method is it requires no infrastructure and minimum expenditure. However, they do require a lot of space and run the disadvantage of taking unto 2-3 weeks for decomposition.
With the average housing society producing unto 100 kgs of waste every day and having no spare space to accommodate a composting pit, using this technique as a solid waste management strategy in a city is just not practical.
It may be feasible in rural localities where space is not a constraint. A few more disadvantages include malodour formation, toxic leachate creation, and increased pestilence are other issues that are often encountered in this process.
Aerating these pits needs frequent manual intervention which is an extremely cumbersome process.
Incomplete degradation due to ineffective indigenous microbes also is a frequently encountered issue.
For a large volume of organic waste, the windrow process is preferred, where the waste is stacked in the form of rows of elongated piles.
The pile dimensions are usually maintained at 4 to 6 feet in height and width of 14 to 16 feet. Aeration is provided through vented pipes.
It can be used for municipal solid waste management at a rural level and for composting agricultural residue.
The greatest advantage of this technique is that it does not require elaborate infrastructural inputs. Handling difficulties remain the same as those faced in composting pits.
This method deals with composting a small volume of waste at the source itself, usually at the household or housing society level. The waste collection and composting happens in a perforated bin to allow aeration.
The number and size of these bins can be increased depending on the quantum of the waste. They may be required to be turned manually or come equipped with a motor to overturn the waste when required.
With proper moisture maintenance and aeration, bin composting is a relatively cost-effective and user-friendly method of community-level biological solid waste management.
This method involves the composting of waste material inside a vessel under controlled conditions. There is better provision for mixing, airflow, and temperature control which helps in accelerating the composting process in this method.
This method is usually used for solid waste management at a community level.
Thermocomposting machines offer the advantages of complete physical containment as compared to pots and pits.
They rapidly reduce the moisture content in the organic waste, thereby taking care of the odour as well as promoting aerobic decomposition.
If locally made, the cost of employing this technology is substantially reduced. Disadvantages: Relatively expensive.
The resulting compost from these machines tends to be of sub-optimal quality, due to which a curing technique (close to a week) needs to be employed, which increases the processing time by a week.
They are more prone to breakdown due to the use of cheaper raw materials.
They, therefore, require frequent servicing, ultimately increasing the input cost.
The most common hurdles encountered in the composting process employed as a solid waste management strategy are
Vermicomposting is carried out using a combination of earthworms and microorganisms for the degradation of organic waste under controlled conditions. This method is usually employed for the biological solid waste management of agro-waste.
Earthworms, being higher life forms, have the heightened capability of digesting complex lignocellulosic matter.
The feces of earthworms have this organic matter broken down into much simpler forms, making it easy for microbes to further breakdown into compost.
The end product obtained is high-quality vermicompost. The drawback of vermicompost is it requires a lot of monitoring of the environmental conditions and food material.
The excessive worms obtained from this process can be used as nutritious feed for fish.
Vermicompost still remains one of the most efficient solid waste management techniques in gardening and agriculture management today.
The term anaerobic digestion itself explains that the microbial degradation of the biodegradable waste occurs in the absence of oxygen.
The system is also known as bio methanation or biogas formation as anaerobic digestion produces gases such as methane and carbon dioxide as its end product.
Methane is a combustible gas that is valuable as it can be used as a renewable source of energy. Anaerobic digestion is one of the most important methods of solid waste management strategies because it is a solution to the ongoing global energy crises.
A major setback of anaerobic digestion is the major investment in infrastructure and the complexity of the process.
Thermochemical conversion is converting the process of converting lignocellulosic waste material into an energy source by subjecting it to heat treatment.
The advantage of this solid waste management technique is its substrate non-specificity. The disadvantage is relatively high investments in infrastructure and energy expenditure. The most common methods for thermochemical treatment are:
Recycling is the process of converting waste into objects of renewed value to prevent waste of materials and reduce wasteful consumption of virgin raw materials, energy, and pollution by decreasing the need for disposal of waste that is not degradable.
Recycling is intrinsic to waste reduction today. It has numerous economic as well as environmental benefits as well.
In conclusion, A sustainable solid waste management strategy would require participation from every section of society. Policies and legislation made by the government should be based on the environmental, financial, and social implications.
Collaborative tie-ups with private companies and assigning them to a specific role can improve the functioning of the system.
Also, the role of citizens in this process plays a huge impact on the segregation of waste, disposal of waste, and implying the approach of reduction, reusing, and opting for more recycled waste wherever possible.
We have one planet, one choice, one chance.
