Welcome back to India!
After your first trip around the globe, with pit stops in Hong Kong, Latin America and East Africa, we are back to Delhi with Lou, to take a peek into the menace of toxic waste and how pollution can end up earning climate mitigation rewards.
As always, we welcome your comments and questions, drop us a line at reporter@climatecorrespondent.com
Thanks for reading!
From a Climate Correspondent team - India, Jocelyn, Lou and Mat
India’s waste crisis
Letter no. 5 by Lou Del Bello in Delhi, India
Waste To Energy power plant in Delhi - Photo by Ranjit Devraj
Even as the grip of a record cold winter starts to loosen and frosty Delhi enjoys the occasional sunny day, small fires on the street at night are still a common sight. They are lit by those who don’t have a well-insulated home to keep warm, or just want to spend a few extra hours with friends before retiring to bed.
These tiny campfires dotting the streets after dusk are fuelled by plastic rubbish, twigs or even tyres, and produce a thick smoke that can be smelled from afar.
On a much bigger scale, India is adopting the same strategy to dispose of the approximately 55 million metric tons of rubbish it produces every year — an amount that is expected to grow threefold by 2030, and of which only 25% is processed, leaving the rest to go to landfill.
Climate rewards
For many years, the government has been investing huge sums into so-called ‘waste to energy’, a formula that is working well in countries like Germany and Sweden by burning segregated waste to produce electricity.
The plants receive waste that’s been separated from components such as dirty paper, food, TV screens or mobile phones, and burn it to produce electricity, minimising the risk of soil and water contamination as well as toxic fumes from open burning.
The concept is so compelling that in 2007 the UN enrolled a large waste to energy plant in Delhi in its Clean Development Mechanism, which assigns carbon credits for avoided emissions from organic waste under the Kyoto protocol.
The 'waste to energy' catch
But while the idea sounds simple, its implementation is not that smooth. To be safe and efficient, a waste to energy plant needs to run on waste that produces a lot of energy when burning and doesn’t release toxins in the process. This includes rubber tyres, plastic containers, discarded textiles and clean, dry paper.
Yet since India’s waste pickers remain the point of entry of India’s waste management process -- collecting rubbish every day from most households and separating useful materials that can be recycled -- what reaches the plant is mostly contaminated organic waste that is unfit for incineration.
And because to date these plants remain the top strategy employed in India to manage its mounting waste crisis, toxic emissions due to the burning of organic matter keep adding to the severe air pollution in Delhi and other Indian cities.
The government has been talking about a new national recycling policy that would reduce the amount of waste to be incinerated and put valuable metals and minerals from used computers, cars or other goods back into the production chain, but so far nothing has happened.
So as spring approaches, Delhi’s small campfires will disappear from the streets, offering respite to the lungs of those who needed them for warmth in the cold season. Yet the controversial waste to energy plant will continue to breach environmental standards — even as it collects carbon credits from the UN.
And while climate mitigation policies are designed somewhere far away, where the air is clean and the water is drinkable, on the ground people still fight to reverse their damaging impacts.
Must reads from the region
Invisible green warriors - Nilanjana Bhowmick, The New Internationalist To understand India’s waste problem, as well as the unique social challenges brought by its caste system, one needs to learn about the plight of its waste pickers, who every morning knock at each door to collect a day’s worth of rubbish, which they will then segregate and when possible sell for recycling.
Who cleans your s**t - Rakhi Bose, News18 An evergreen interactive piece that follows one day in the life of a manual scavenger, one of the most underprivileged communities in India. In most old buildings, the sewage system is built with manual scavengers in mind, and cannot be maintained without a person literally diving into the sewer to unblock it.
India Has Set Up 186 Waste-to-Energy Projects So Far - Anjana Parik, Mercom India A snapshot of the growing investments into waste to energy in India, despite the controversies over its safety and efficiency.
What else I’ve been reading
Waste of a Nation: Garbage and Growth in India - Assa Doron, Robin Jeffrey A must for the reader who after this week’s issue is thirsty for more stories from India’s underbelly. This book accompanies the authors in a journey of discovery that explores much more than dirt and pollution, learning how India’s waste crisis is inextricably linked not only to its economic system, but also to its history and cultural taboos.