Case Study: Mumbai co-operatives help decentralise recycling

Grainne McIntyre, consultant, lives locally and reflects on what might help Dunbar become a Zero Waste Town through the first of 5 case studies from across the globe

The Indian city of Mumbai, population 12.5m, is divided into 24 wards, each with individual budgets and waste management responsibility. The city government operates a communal waste collection system, effectively a ‘waste bring’ system for 78% of households, and house to house collections for just 22%. Historically, most waste has ended up in one of the three landfill sites. The sites are however were at a critical point. The volume of waste would have been reduced by ‘waste pickers’ who removed recoverable materials either for reuse or recycling. However with routine  soil covering now in operation,  and private operators banning recyclers, costs of disposal were on the up.

Incredibly for a city of this size, there is no formal Government recycling programme, but a flourishing informal one, which creates materials for recycling industries, reduces waste transportation costs and has a range of obvious environmental benefits. There are downsides as the industry is deregulated, recyclers are unlikely to receive a fair price for their work, and there is no health and safety protection. Interestingly the informal system is decentralised and each operation unique. One body in particular is playing its part in formalising the sector. As with a lot of under-privileged areas, it is women that do the low paid hard work. A non-governmental group (NGO) – Stree Mukti Sanghatana (SMS) – have taken up the task of training the women. A programme was created to teach them the principles of zero waste, how to sort and handle waste, composting and biogas plant management. Teaching how to organise worker co-operatives and negotiate contracts benefits not just the individuals involved but has intergenerational advantages too as household expectations collectively rise. The organisation also helps with contracting and marketing for individual workers and cooperatives. The cooperatives have now entered into recycling contracts with local businesses, local government, institutions and apartment complexes.

The table below shows how the Cooperatives have created distinct sites and the employment it is providing.

Source:  SMS 2012

SMS’s strategy has been to ‘localise’ sorting and processing as much as possible, whether on a large campus site or at an apartment building level. The localised solutions entailed in such a decentralised approach required a lot of tailoring and this can make it difficult to standardise systems or to scale things up. Their experience suggests that solutions need to be adaptable rather than modularised but they found that it was possible to stimulate demand for services and recyclables. Arguably, small-scale enterprises were able to respond more quickly to changes in the waste or recycling landscape, though one thing they’d not planned for was high staff turnover – a measure of the project’s success. The main successes seem at least in part to be due to adaptability, a certain scale of operation and a latent market, a willingness to develop a diversity of solutions and therefore an ability to experiment at different locations.

Mumbai’s recycling successes are perhaps unique in that it is done by the people for the people, communities working together in a unique city. So what are the lessons for a small, coastal town in Scotland like Dunbar, given there are few apparent similarities? Certain principles are the same no doubt. There are obvious differences of scale, much greater regulation in Scotland and perhaps fewer opportunities for experimentation.  The solutions that arose in Mumbai were distinctively bottom up, and though without obvious Government intervention – they had their full co-operation, with the leadership coming from local NGOs and people willing to change rather than driven by a middleclass or lifestyle choice.

Perhaps the local problem we face is that few of us see the real value (or costs) in the wastes that we create and that our waste is just another (globally) traded commodity. We take it as granted that our Council has done a respectable job in providing us with uniform and universal solution. Does the Zero Waste Town concept offer us the opportunity to shed greater light on the real costs and opportunities, as well as start to experiment and build up a local capacity? In order for a bottom up approach to work, there needs to be greater scope and flexibility for genuinely local solutions, and not just ones that work at the very smallest scale.

References:

Virali Gokaldas (2012) Waste Picker-run biogas Plants as a decentralized solution. Originally published in:- On the road to Zero Waste: Successes and lessons from around the World (Gaia, 2012). http://bit.ly/1h44X5l Retrieved 28/12/2013

http://streemuktisanghatana.org/programs/parisar-vikas/ Retrieved 28/12/2013