www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNhEk2j9aT8

Every morning before heading off to the Chintan office I eat a bowl of cornflakes with a banana. It’s both the minor indulgence of a Midwestern American guy living abroad and a method of giving my stomach one break per day from the spicy and voluminous curries, dals, and masala dishes that otherwise constitute my meals.

"The Usual"

"The Usual"

Several days ago I looked up from the little archipelago of flakes floating in my milk to the cereal box and banana peel, curious about their fate.  Like most kitchen waste in Delhi, they’ll be tossed in the trashcan together. I try to separate the recyclables from the organics, but I suspect that once they leave the kitchen they are all mixed up anyway.

Since this is a common “service apartment,” there is a gentleman named Radu who lives with the landlord downstairs and swings by occasionally to clean and empty the trash. I’m always curious where the heck it goes. There is no curbside pickup; I see no large dustbins anywhere on the block; and unlike my first apartment in Delhi, here there is no independent door-to-door wastepicker who rings the bell each day to collect the waste.

In situations like this, the family helpers often take the garbage directly to the neighborhood “dhalao,” or disposal unit. So today I marched over to the dhalao nearby, where I met a group of wastepickers meticulously segregating the incoming trash into organics, which they can’t use, and recyclables, which they can. It is here where my banana peel and cereal box part ways.

The Dhalao

The dhalao in my neighborhood. The dump bin in the foreground is full of waste that the wastepickers can't recycle. Behind the bin inside the structure I met a half dozen men segregating waste.

The brunt of waste in dhalaos comes directly from private residences, and the rest arrives on the rickshaws and backs of the wastepickers themselves. Dhalaos provide small but crucial space for segregation in an otherwise incomprehensibly dense city. City trucks then collect what remains after the wastepickers have finished sorting at the dhalaos and transport it to the city dumps.

These wastepickers work out of the dhalao in my neighborhood in the southern part of New Delhi.

These wastepickers work out of the dhalao in my neighborhood in the southern part of New Delhi.

Here’s where it gets crazy. Such thoroughly sorted waste is perfect for composting.  And as I wrote last week, composting is one method of keeping wet waste out of landfills where it would otherwise decompose under anaerobic conditions, releasing methane (a potent greenhouse gas) into the atmosphere. So the two government entities in the area, the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) have teamed up with a private firm to create a composting unit to earn greenhouse gas emissions reduction credits.

I visited this composting unit, in Okhla, and spoke with the manager.  The 200 tons of pre-segregated organic waste that arrives each day is delivered for free by the NDMC and MCD. It comes mostly from dhalaos, and because the waste has been pre-sorted by the wastepickers, there are huge savings for the composting unit and city. In fact, the manager was surprisingly deferential and spoke of the necessity of the wastepickers in his business model. After seven weeks of windrow composting, my banana peel becomes organic fertilizer, which is then sold to a wholesale fertilizer company for profit.  The wastepickers, at present, see none of the proceeds.

Bags of organic fertilizer ready to be sold from the Okhla composting unit.

Bags of organic fertilizer, the final product of the Okhla composting plant, ready to be trucked off and sold to a fertilizer wholesaler.

This project also has been approved for greenhouse gas emissions reduction credits through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The CDM is an offset scheme developed through the Kyoto Protocol whereby industrialized countries with emission-reduction commitments can finance and implement emission-reducing projects in developing countries in order to help meet their own Kyoto targets.

The Okhla composting plant is slated to receive emissions reduction credits amounting to 234,231 metric tones of CO2 equivalent over a seven-year period. At current carbon prices this amounts to roughly 3.5 million dollars. Who knows what the firm’s initial investment in the composting unit was, but it’s clear that the land was free, the waste is delivered for free, and the hard work of the wastepickers effectively subsidizes the composting unit. Composting is a great thing for the climate, but if those who are responsible for its benefits are shut out of the process, social justice is jettisoned for green profit.

In pursuit of even more CDM credits and some electricity, the city now has plans to site a waste-to-energy plant next door. Since waste-to-energy plants often burn dry, combustible waste to heat their boilers and turn their turbines, they are in direct competition with the wastepickers for the city’s recyclable waste content. They also have poor track records in developing countries and many times have worse energy and emissions balances than traditional recycling of the sort that wastepickers undertake. It’s a shame that in pursuit of ostensibly “clean” energy, the livelihoods of some India’s hardest working urban poor are jeopardized.

Thus far, this sign is all that exists of the proposed waste-to-energy plant.

Thus far, this sign is all that exists of the proposed waste-to-energy plant.

The good news is that wastepickers and NGOs who support them are beginning to organize around these issues.  At the recent climate talks in Bonn, a coalition of wastepickers from around the world held a roundtable discussion and press conference to a packed audience in order to address unsustainable CDM projects that affect their work. Chintan is among this dynamic global network of activists who are pressing hard for more inclusive, rational, and sustainable policies on waste and climate.

1.    For most of last week it topped out at over 110 degrees Fahrenheit in New Delhi.

2.    Consequently, I felt like this poor fool:

Chillin'

Chillin'

3.    Yet this has nothing to do with climate and everything to do weather.

4.    Weather is the daily meteorological and environmental conditions in an area, such as heat or cold, wetness or dryness, calm or storm, clearness or cloudiness.

5.    Climate, on the other hand, is the moving average of weather patterns and events over a period of time (the standard length of time for our purposes is 30 years).

6.    Unfortunately, the climate is changing – our averages are climbing.

7.    This is a bummer for many Americans, because we tend to like Florida, intact glaciers, and charismatic mega-fauna like polar bears. But we hate heat waves, wildfires, and suffocating fish.

8.    It’s even more devastating for many Indians, because changing rainfall and monsoon patterns will affect scarce water resources, threaten biodiversity, and hit the rural poor in the agricultural sector particularly hard.

9.    Global climate change is partly driven by anthropogenic (human-induced) emissions of several greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4).

10.    According to the World Resources Institute, the waste sector accounts for about 3.8% of total global greenhouse gas emissions. In India this figure is nearly double – 6.7%.

11.    Emissions from the waste sector take two primary forms: 1) carbon dioxide is released from the production, distribution, and use of consumer goods that are ultimately thrown away; and 2) methane, which is roughly 72 times more potent than CO2 over a 20 year time horizon, is emitted from landfills into the atmosphere during the anaerobic decomposition of a city’s garbage.

Informal recyclers working at the peak of the Okhla dump

Informal recyclers working at the peak of the Okhla dump

12.    Think of it like this – every item in the heap of trash at your landfill represents the end point of a very long process that includes extraction and processing of raw materials; manufacture of products; transportation of materials and products to markets; use by consumers; and eventually waste management.

13.    Virtually every step along this “life cycle” impacts greenhouse gas emissions. In the early and middle stages, CO2 is released from power plants burning coal to supply electricity to factories, from trucks and ships running on petroleum, and so on. If a product is incinerated at the end of its life, CO2 is released along with other toxic emissions called dioxins and furans.  Alternatively, if it is landfilled, methane seeps out for several decades. Either way the atmosphere loses.

14.    Thus, reducing, re-using, recycling, and composting the various streams of municipal solid waste can mitigate both carbon dioxide and methane emissions. It takes much less energy to use recycled inputs in manufacturing than it takes to extract, process, and transport virgin materials. And if we “close the loop” of production with recycling, composting, and waste prevention, these products never need to be burned or buried.

In this diagram, MTCE stands for Metric Tons of Carbon Equivalent. In scenario 1 up top, disposing of 100 tons of office paper in the standard fashion results in emissions of 62 MTCE. In scenario 2, recycling some of this paper results in a REDUCTION of 65 MTCE. Source: US Environmental Protection Agency

In this diagram, MTCE stands for Metric Tons of Carbon Equivalent. In scenario 1 up top, disposing of 100 tons of office paper in the standard fashion results in emissions of 62 MTCE. In scenario 2, recycling some of this paper results in a REDUCTION of 65 MTCE. Source: US Environmental Protection Agency

15.    For example, a groundbreaking new study by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Eco-Cycle, and G.A.I.A. found that if Americans could simply reduce waste generation 1% each year and divert 90% of our discards from landfills and incinerators by the year 2030, the greenhouse gas savings would amount to closing 1/5 of all coal-fired power plants in the country.

16.    Delhi’s waste problem is gargantuan. This is partly due to the booming population in India and the rapid rate of urbanization.

17.    But it’s also due to mismanagement. For a megalopolis of 15 million people, Delhi has just three open dumps, all of which are unsanitary and overflowing. The city generates over 6,000 metric tons of waste per day. Yet only half of the city’s tipper trucks run at any one time, there is a dearth of garbage bins in public places, and residents very rarely segregate their waste.  Much of it, frankly, is just thrown on the street.

18.    The city has come up with all kinds of quick-fix solutions, from burning the waste to making it into pellets to fuel power plants, to compressing it into bales, wrapping it in plastic, and stacking it a half mile in the air. But the best climate and waste models out there suggest that good old recycling and composting, while not as sexy as these technologies, offer greater reductions in greenhouse gas emissions than landfillng and incineration, and often have superior net energy balances as well.

19.    Here’s where the wastepickers come in.  They are India’s most efficient recyclers. In Delhi, informal wastepickers, junk dealers, and small recyclers number around 100,000 people.  The average wastepicker recycles 60 kilograms per day.  This saves the municipality a ton of money and reduces emissions.

Okhla wastepicker families taking a break

Okhla wastepicker families taking a break

20.    In the final analysis, it is clear that wastepickers are owed a climate debt.  The thrust of my research this summer is to calculate this climate debt and help Chintan craft a campaign to connect these climate entrepreneurs to resources that will facilitate their environmentally friendly livelihoods.

Recycling plastic bottles at Ghazipur

Recycling plastic bottles at Ghazipur