Use and Throw! Is there no way out of the mess?

Dharmesh Shah

Last week after the yearly house cleaning we ended up with two cartons full of unwanted stuff and like most people we had no option but chucking it into the green curb-side bins. The garbage truck arrived at the same time and unloaded the entire bin into the compressor along with all my stuff. Now I knew that a lot of it, though absolutely useless to me, was still worth saving or putting to better use. I slipped into a momentary nostalgia and summoned up the call of the Kabariwala on a tricycle who would come home to collect discards. I still do see the occasional Kabariwala but I had also found myself easily adapted to the convenient use and throw lifestyle. However, I decided to follow the truck out of curiosity to see where all my stuff was going to end up.

After a long ride on my motor bike, past the incongruous IT corridor, I reached, Perungudi in the Pallikaranai marshlands of South Chennai. I remembered reading about the Pallikaranai marshlands on Wikipedia. Once spread over 5000 hectares, it is one of South India’s last remaining freshwater wet land networks ecologically assigned the task of storing and replenishing the ground water for the city of Chennai. The marshland is also rich in biodiversity and supports a variety of flora and fauna. Nearly, 61 species of plants, 106 species of birds, 50 species of fish and 21 species of reptiles are found here. Many of them are endemic (exclusively found) to Pallikaranai marshes.

The final resting place for my waste was a 250 acre plot within the marshlands where most of what I threw would remain buried for several thousand years. The city of Chennai generates nearly 3500 metric tonnes of waste per day, which eats into a bit of the marshland every day. It was a real mess and what really perplexed me was that as a nation we were building the biggest dams and laying the longest highways but failing miserably when it came to simple task of “potty training”. What could be more ironical for a water starved city like Chennai where we abuse our local water banks and then spend millions on piping water from far flung villages?

Garbage dumps like Perungudi forms a part of all urban landscapes across India, often remaining strategically ousted from the municipal limits of a city. On the outskirts of a city the waste becomes the black man’s burden, to be borne by communities marginalized from economics or in the case of India those ousted from religion. The areas surrounding Perungudi are perpetually surrounded by a veil of toxic* smoke belching out of the smoldering garbage and the smell of putrefying food hugs the air 24x7. Yet, I could see thousands of people living around Pallikaranai and several hundreds rummaging through the garbage piles eking a living out of what I threw out. On a social level, the implications of such waste-racism are far fetched.

I soon began reading about the politics of waste and made astonishing connections between everything that is wrong with the environment. Our lifestyles, obviously, takes the biggest blame because we are trying to run a non-recyclable system on a planet with limited resources. Plastics are a classic example, where fossil oil is converted into a something that the earth cannot recycle or consume, hence breaking the very cycle of life on which everything depends. Plastic waste is posing to be the biggest man made environmental challenge. On land they wreak havoc by chocking water bodies and causing floods and in the ocean they cause unimaginable destruction. In 1988 scientists discovered what they termed as the ‘Pacific Trash Vortex’ or the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, in the North Pacific Ocean. The Patch, characterized by exceptionally high concentrations of plastics, chemical sludge, and other debris trapped by ocean currents, is the as big as the continental United States. Samples of marine life from the patch show the presence of plastics at the microscopic level, ie; inside the bodies of zooplanktons.

It is certainly an overwhelming problem, especially for people who are concerned about the future of the planet and looking for ways to make a difference. Fortunately, in the context of waste, it is fairly simple to achieve sustenance with 3 simple thumb rules –

Phase out plastics – Always be conscious of what you buy and refuse disposable plastics in any form. Once the demand for plastic declines producers will be forced to explore other packaging.

Segregate at Source – Always separate your wet (kitchen) waste from your dry waste. This makes the plastics, papers and metals in the waste re-usable/recyclable hence reducing the burden on extractive processes like mining and drilling.

Compost – Composting is easy and fun. This will offset your carbon footprint by several hundred tons. There are fabulous online guides like www.dailydump.org which give a spoon-fed introduction to composting.

Adopting these methods require very little re-thinking but will have a far reaching effect in saving the planet not just for ourselves but for our children too.

Published in Ritz Magazine, Chennai

----------------------------------------------------------

* An air sample at Perungudi revealed the presence of nearly 27 toxic chemicals including 3 that cause cancer among humans.