The domestic waste, generally regarded as the Municipal Solid Waste, is generated at the household level through various human activities which havealready been discussed in the previous articles in this column.
Now, we will try to understand the impact of mismanagement of this waste on the environmental, social and economical and what should we do at the individual level and at the community level.
We generate ‘heterogeneous’ kind of waste at the domestic level as it is usually a mixture of wet waste and dry waste which is eventually disposed off only to get accumulated in the by-lanes and roadsides.
Let us assume that in a particular area or neighborhood of a city, there are about 20000 houses, each house generating approximately 2 kg of ‘mixed’ waste everyday amounting to total 40000 kg of waste.
Now this 40000 kgs of waste will be first dumped openly alongside of some road or by-lane in that neighborhood. It will be left there at least for a day or so till the local cleaning staff, appointed by the urban local body, arrives there at a stipulated time to fetch that load of garbage which will be dumped in a truck. That truck will then move to another such location where more or less same volume of garbage will have piled up. Finally, when that truck is filled to its capacity, it will travel some distance to reach its destination, that is a dumping yard.
A dumping yard is a piece of open land reserved for dumping the city garbage. Before moving ahead, let us visit a garbage heap amounting to 40000 kgs lying along the roadside.
Look there, can you see some animal activity there? Yes. There are crows, there are dogs, there are rats scurrying around and then there are house flies and other insects along with the humans labelled Rag Pickers. And oh my god!
We can see a few cows searching through that heap of garbage. What are the cows doing here? No wonder. People like you and me in the neighborhood have stored and packed their left over stale food and other eatables in a plastic bag which has ended up eventually into this garbage.
Poor cows get attracted towards such bags containing food very carelessly thrown by the people and in an attempt to consume the food inside that bag, they end up in swallowing the plastic bag itself. The cow gets terribly sick and eventually die most of the times as plastic is very much unnatural ‘food’ for her.
The irony here is that we consider cows as our Holy Mother and treat her with utmost respect in our culture. Killing a cow for beef is not acceptable to us. It is beyond our tolerance limits. If that is the case, then we should think a hundred times before exposing our Holy Mother to such heinous act of disposing the food waste packed in plastic bags!
(The writer is an environment specialist. Views personal.)
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