400 grams of conscience...

mea culpa, tua culpa 

400 grams.

Just 400 grams. 

This is what each denizen of this city throws out as garbage on an average day. 

How much does this 400 grams of garbage weigh?

'Big deal!' you say.

It is indeed a big deal!

My city has close to 2 Million people. 

So, the actual weight of this 400 grams is 800,000 kilos of garbage, 800 tons that is, every single day, except a festival day. Then it goes up to 1000 tons of pure garbage.

My city is not alone. World over, this pile of garbage and the safe handling or the lack of it is a huge problem that results in monumental disasters from time to time (just a few months back a garbage mound went bottoms up and buried 100 plus people who were literally living 'on' it, just outside Colombo, Srilanka).

Take the case of my city, nestled at the foothills of western ghats.

Till the Eighties, garbage had virtually no plastic in it. People were responsible in their purchases, not many houses had Refrigerators, people reused / recycled whatever they could at their homes. What they could not, found its way into a dump yard at the then western edge of the city. Processing the garbage was easy; they were composted and sold off to eager farmers who would line up to buy this 'healthy fertilizer' (even today this area of the city is referred as 'manure company' area).

Somewhere into the narrative plastic found its way. Then all stink broke loose. The stench was unbearable even many kilometers away from this spot. City handlers of this garbage pile were forced to hunt for a suitable relocation site elsewhere as the ghats didn't give them much room to move further west/ north.

They found a land on the eastern side, well outside the city limits. They had one problem though. 'How to convince people living in this area to part with their fertile land?'

This area was actively cultivated by herdsmen living there, growing fodder crops for their cattle. Around that time, these fellas too had a problem; water, the lack of it, to grow their fodder. So a deal was struck. The garbage handlers shall bring sewage water from the city all the way to this hamlet (in addition to garbage from the city), use the processed water to grow fodder, 50 percent of which would be given off to the herdsmen in exchange of 800 acres of fertile land that had around 70 wells in it.

Around the same time, some young guy with a penchant for playing Golf formed a club and began work on a full fledged 18-hole course nearby.

Some time later, the treated water from the hamlet miraculously found its way into the golf course, helping their lush green to stay green.

'Fodder?' You scream! What fodder, we needed only a world class golf course!

Economic liberalization in 1991 pushed this Manufacturing hub of a city into a rapid growth trajectory; city started to grow quickly in all directions.

With the new found money, denizens started spending more on buying and less on using / reusing / recycling. Soon vehicles started hauling more and more garbage which was wrapped by plastic of all types of hazards, chemical, medical and so on. 

Ground water became contaminated and turned into yellow, like YELLOW!

While all these were going on, city authorities approved a new housing layout just outside the dump yard. 350 plus families bought housing plots without knowing what they were actually buying.

Emperor of all maladies, Cancer, became a regular visitor and he invariably moved out with the host...

Many ailments, many protests, many cases and many court verdicts later, the authorities have promised to shift out the huge garbage mountain from this dump yard into areas further down, for 'filling' the land with these plastic rich waste. Somewhere in the future even these areas would be occupied by our ilk and they would not be spared either...

So, if you thought the weight of 400 grams is only 800 tons, rethink!

Question time:

1. Why are we so pathetically oblivious to the environmental degradation our very act of throwing out garbage causes?

2. Why are 'they' "paying with their lives" for our cozy city living habits?

3. Why are we so pathetically short of waste segregation and recycling? Why our schools don't 'show' the way to kids at school?

3. Manufacturers pay the raw material producers and use those materials to make stuff we drool for. We pay the manufacturers / their conduits and use their stuff for our pleasure. The waste we throw out after use poses a further set of tricky questions. 

a. Must we be paid for the garbage we throw out (if it can be recycled)? You like this question right?!

b. Must we be charged for the reusable / recyclable garbage that we recklessly throw out? Why not publish a 'Banned' list of garbage that must be recycled by the buyer (ourselves) or penalised for not doing so?

b. For the rest of the garbage, why not charge the manufacturer for selling us something that we cannot recycle?

Even better, why not the manufacturer charge the buyer at the point of purchase for collecting back the garbage resulting out of stuff she delivered and recycling it? No need for a 'banned' list then. It would be cost effective due to centralized processing...

Why not mandate the usage of a part of the huge profits these manufacturers make, on collecting and recycling? You say, 'CSR?', I say 'Aye'!

Reality check: In a nation of 125 crore people and a few thousand manufacturers, it seems far easier for the decision makers to implore the 125C to stop using plastic instead of banning the 1000s of Ms from using plastic in their products (inside as well as outside!). 

Necessity is the mother of invention and these big manufacturing companies for sure can burn just a minuscule portion of their huge profits to innovate earth friendly 'garbage' as their way of thanking nature. They got everything (that they needed) from her, after all. 

By the way, cost of 'managing' just one kilo of solid waste is roughly 160 US Dollars as per a report from World Bank (data five years old) that you can access by shouting 'What a Waste' at Google god; it shall fetch you a glorious 116 page document about trash. Go figure but keep a few cloth bags in you vehicle / work bag and, this is more important; commit yourself to 'Reduce, Refuse, Reuse, Recycle' from now on. 

If we do these, we shall be delivered from the weight of these 400 grams from our conscience forever.