Mission City Chakra
Instead of creating waste and finding ways to manage it, how about reducing it? Is it even possible? Yes, It is possible and we all can do it.
Garbage in the city, by the roadside, and in the rivers is not the problem but a symptom of the problem. It is an indication that something is wrong.
The challenge of waste is not a new one. It started a while back its effects are becoming apparent now.
Great Pacific Garbage Patch
It was the year 1997. Captain Charles Moore aboard his boat named Algalita. After finishing the boat race on the Hawaii islands, he was on the way home to California.
Instead of the regular route, he decided to traverse a longer path. This area of the Pacific Ocean is called a desert for the lack of fish in the area. The ocean currents do not make sailing a great experience either. It certainly is not a favorite spot for the vessels. The team travelled for a week without sighting any other boat.
Third day onwards, however, they began to see plastic waste in the water, a bottle lid, and a broken seal. Eventually, the frequency increased and what they chanced upon on the seventh day of the travel shocked them.
It was like an island, an island comprised of garbage. It was huge. It was the size of four Maharashtra states combined. Moore named it the ‘great Pacific garbage patch’.
Who dumped so much garbage here, wondered Charles Moore. A garbage island in the middle of nowhere? How is that possible? He assumed it might be the garbage dumped by the naval vessels.
He could not take that sight out of his mind. After two years, he returned fully equipped, with a team of scientists. They collected samples. Most of the garbage was plastic waste.
A study of samples revealed that almost 80% of the garbage was discarded as waste on the land. The garbage had traveled here through the streams, rivers, and ultimately the ocean currents.
Such garbage patches exist not only in the Pacific Ocean but everywhere. So much garbage in our oceans? How? Why?
Humans are not the only ones who utilize materials. Birds build nests using twigs, leaves, grass blades, and cotton. Sea creatures use Calcium carbonate to make protective shells around themselves. Plants harness Carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for photosynthesis.
However, we are the only ones who cause pollution.
There are two factors to consider, material type and material quantity. Birds build a nest, lay eggs, eggs hatch, the chicks learn to fly and the brood goes away one day, leaving behind the nest. The abandoned nest withers with rain and wind, falls to the ground and returns to the soil leaving no trace.
A peak into our past reveals a similar story. We are not born with sharp nails and teeth. We devised tools to pluck fruits, dig out tubers, and hunt. The tools were made of stone, bones, or wood. The broken, discarded wooden or bone tool is used to decompose and return to the soil. The stone would continue withering and someday would become soil.
With the onset of the metal age, things did not change much since all metals are recyclable. A metal tool can be melted and converted into a new tool or artifact creating no waste.
The industrial revolution was the game changer. Machines increased our productivity by a multitude. We engineered various new materials that nature does not have a mechanism to process. They do not decompose in nature but continue piling up as garbage.
Back in the 18th century, at the time of the Industrial Revolution, it did not seem a challenge. Earth was too large, the oceans too vast to have any impact of our actions.
However, our capacity to impact nature has increased with every passing decade. Today all the municipalities in the world are grappling with the waste management challenge.
Pune City
Pune city faced many challenges; it was invaded, and it was destroyed and rebuilt. The city that stood up to those challenges with a brave face now seems to be buckling under the ever-increasing waste.
What would be the situation a few years down the line?
Mission City Chakra
Concept
Instead of creating waste and finding various ways to manage it; how about minimizing the waste?
Mission City Chakra project began with this same objective with the vision of ‘A Clean and Healthy City by DESIGN’. It is a project by the Centre for Sustainable Development under the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics.
A leaf falls off the tree, decomposes, and returns nutrients to the soil. That's the circular design in nature. A forest is a complex ecosystem with a multitude of processes yet no waste. In a circular design, the output of a process serves as an input to some other process.
Mission City Chakra aims to design similar systems in the city so that nothing goes to waste.
Material Driven Strategy
Wet waste is already in the circular system because it is biodegradable. Steel though not biodegradable is in the circular system because it can be recycled into new products any number of times.
Plastic is neither biodegradable nor infinitely recyclable. Either directly or after 2-3 rounds of recycling, it becomes waste. It does not decompose but degrades into smaller and smaller pieces called microplastics polluting the environment. The same is the case with cloth like polyester and acrylic.
Most metals are infinitely recyclable and hence rarely end up as waste.
Glass is recyclable though a challenge exists in its safe collection and transportation.
Paper is biodegradable and recyclable.
Construction and Demolition i.e. C&D waste comprises of cement, concrete, bricks which is partially reusable, difficult to recycle.
The ‘R’ Framework
The R framework provides a guiding principle for material-driven action. Actions are more resource-energy intensive and polluting as we move towards the right on the spectrum. Actions on the spectrum’s left are preventive while those on the right are corrective.
Refuse and Reduce actions form the backbone of the zero-waste strategy. These two actions are preventive and hence always the most effective in reducing waste.
Recycle action is the end-of-pipe intervention that attempts to bring the waste back into circulation as a resource. From a zero-waste point of view, it is the last resort because the recycling process creates pollution, and consumes resources and energy.
Preventive actions involve behaviour change and hence are difficult to implement. End-of-pipe actions are technological interventions that are readily accepted as the onus is outsourced to the recycling agency and the technology.
The appropriate choice of R for a material depends on the material’s
Ability to be in the circular system.
Impact on our health and environment after its end-of-life
Impact Driven Decision
Plastic is neither biodegradable nor infinitely recyclable. Either directly or after 2-3 rounds of recycling, it ends up as waste.
It does not decompose however it degrades into smaller and smaller pieces called microplastics polluting the environment.
Microplastics are already in our food chain. We eat, drink and breathe in microplastic every single day.
What would be the situation if things remain as they are? What would be the state of the environment in the future if nothing changes today?
When the impact of the material on human health and environmental health is severe like in the case of plastic where recycling cannot provide a permanent solution, the appropriate strategy for such material is REFUSE and REDUCE.
Refuse where possible
Reduce consumption where refusal altogether is not possible
New plastic products enter our lives every day and become waste. It is like a tap running at full force. Our city is drowning in the plastic waste. Recycling is like removing a spoonful from the puddle hoping to avert the disaster unfolding in front of us.
Recycling is simply a STOP-GAP solution. The actual solution is turning off the tap.
A zero-waste City
In a city like Pune, there are many waste generators in lacs spread over the vast area.
Instead of reaching out to every waste generator, which is not feasible, Mission City Chakra groups the citizens into establishments.
The project identifies and collaborates with the POLICY MAKER of each establishment to make it a zero-waste unit through a combination of policy enforcement and targeted awareness generation.
waste-zero-schools, waste-zero-offices, waste-zero housing societies, waste-zero institutes, waste-zero restaurants, waste-zero-events ultimately would make our city A WASTE-ZERO-CITY
We are all Policy Makers
How to design these systems? How to bring about this huge change? Do we, the common citizens have that kind of power?
We are all policymakers. We decide what to buy, and what not to buy on the household level.
A school principal is a more powerful policy maker who can nudge hundreds of students and their parents towards a desired positive behavior. A corporate office administrator can have an impact on thousands of employees.
Mission City Chakra – Schools
Phase I
Children eat from plastic tiffin boxes and drink water from plastic water bottles from the age of five to fifteen. Imagine the impact on their health through additives in plastic and on the environment when the tiffins and bottles are discarded.
Mission City Chakra appeal to the school principals is to
Make steel tiffin boxes and steel bottles compulsory for the students taking new admission, thus blocking the plastic at the entry point.
Ban plastic or laminated paper covers for the textbooks starting from the next academic year.
Make a rule for existing students to go for steel tiffin and bottle when it is time to replace their existing plastic ones.
In the next 2-3 years, these plastic products will be completely phased out from the schools reducing waste generation, and preventing negative health and environmental impact.
Phase II
Mission City Chakra identifies the biggest source of waste generation in the school in consultation with the principal and then helps them implement projects to rectify the same.
Mission City Chakra – Corporate
If a person uses paper cups for tea every day in the office, then it is 2 cups a day, 10 cups a week, 40 cups a month, and 480 cups a year.
If the office has 100 employees, then it is 48,000 paper cup waste in a year.
For 1000 employees, it is 4,80,000, and for 10,000 employees, it is 48,00,000 in a year. A shift from paper cups to steel cups eliminates waste in an instant.
A corporate office administrator can bring about such a huge positive impact.
So can housing societies committees, hotel managers, restaurant managers, and event managers.
After all, WE ALL ARE POLICY MAKERS!!!