Garbage to Gold

Mumbai faces the critical problem of solid waste management. Mumbai produces around 6,000 tonnes of garbage every day. Although the BMC has employed 25,000 workers to collect and dump garbage, and spends Rs.400 crores annually on garbage collection, the staff strength is not sufficient to meet the city's needs.
Moreover, like any other municipality in a developing country, the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai does not do any recycling on its own. The corporation still views solid waste management from the traditional perspective of waste collection, transport and disposal.
With waste quantity rising and landfills shrinking, recycling and reuse may be the only solution. Smart businesses could find gold in this garbage. At present, the waste-market industry, potentially worth billions, is still at the embryonic stage.
Before recycling and reuse, our basic problem is decentralizing waste management and getting households to learn to separate dry waste from wet waste and not having the Bombay Municipal Corp garbage trucks mix both together.
To overcome this problem of solid waste management, we came up with the idea of introducing segregated trash compactors that allow recycling of organic wastes and plastics across the city.
These trash compactors will be segregated into PET (polyethylene terepthalate) plastic, non PET plastic and biodegradable waste. These collected wastes can then be converted into reusable material and energy. Mumbai has no large scale method for segregating wet waste and plastic-this will be the first model of its type.
The obvious advantages of this idea is that it will increase awareness about recycling, along with reducing pressure on landfills, conserving natural resources and reducing our carbon footprint.
The conversion of these wastes into material and energy has the potential to yield huge profits. Biodegradable waste can be converted to methane to produce electricity, as well as composted to produce fertilizers. It can also be converted into a fuel known as green coal which has a high calorific value. Non PET plastics are toxic and can be converted to diesel by closed loop restrictive distillation. PET plastics, on the other hand, can be converted into fibres and woven into sacks.

This is all very well, but how do we ensure that the majority of the waste the city generates actually reaches these compactors? To motivate citizens and ragpickers to dispose of collected waste in these trash compactors, we plan to introduce a coin dispensing mechanism to dispense Rs 10 for each kilo of trash deposited in these compactors placed at strategic positions around the city.
Mumbai’s waste-pickers are very crucial in keeping Mumbai 'clean and healthy'. The garbage economy of Mumbai offers work to over 20,000-25,000 waste-pickers and scrap collectors, 80 per cent of whom are dalit women. These women are mostly migrants. They search through garbage from public dustbins and salvage scrap from the rubbish, which is later recycled through scrap traders. They earn an average of Rs 50 a day to sustain their whole family.
A network of ragickers from associations such as Stree Mukti Sangathana (SMS) and Forum for Recycling Community & Environment (FORCE) who will greatly benefit from the steady income can be employed to collect segregated trash from homes, who will then empty the rubbish into the trash compactors. These households will be charged a nominal fee of Rs 100 per month.
These women will earn a steady income through this scheme, as well as the income they generate by selling the dry trash collected such as paper, metal and glass to scrap collectors.
The compacted and segregated trash will then be sold to various companies that convert the waste to useful materials and energy.
We also plan to tie up with the BMC and the media to promote awareness about the urgent need -of recycling and spread the message to various housing societies, shopkeepers associations, schools and colleges.