Making the most of a mess - Municipal Solid Waste management

The MSW project will develop a matrix for evaluating technology options and attempt to make recommendations on an appropriate basket of solutions integrating city planning and infrastructure development.

Municipal solid waste (MSW) in India is still disposed in unsanitary landfill sites. Pockets of comunity-led initiatives have shown that source segregation, composting and recycling coupled with innovative and simple technologies can be ecologically sustainable. The complexity arises when centralised solutions based on high-end technology are favoured while all other experiments and demonstrations of superior MSW management methods are ignored. The reasons for such technolgy adoption seem many - budgetary allocations under central schemes targeted at city renewal, carbon finance, or just lack of political will to hammer out a systematic process that is holistic and environmentally sustainable.

Till the time an effective process is in place to tackle MSW, and given a definitive focus on technology, it becomes significant to guide technology selection based on a comprehensive and objective evaluation.

The MSW project will develop a matrix for evaluating technology options and attempt to make recommendations on an appropriate basket of solutions integrating city planning and infrastructure development.

Keywords:

Website: