Blogs

Out of sight, out of mind seems to be the guiding principle for our behaviour

The controversial Timarpur-Okhla incineration plant in New Delhi could serve as an example of why incineration is not the answer to Chennai's solid waste problem.

Imagine opening one of your drawers on a typical office day and discovering to your horror a used sanitary napkin lying there. This is a scene in a promotional video created for a better sanitary waste management system in Pune. Its message is clear: it would be unpleasant for you to discover a blood-soaked sanitary pad in your workplace so why force waste pickers to undergo this?

Amassing the dailies, monthlies and squeezed-till-I-have-made-sure-I-can’t-extract-more-paste toothpaste tubes/shampoo bottles and such other ’junk’, in one end of the cabinet (whose other end was often a concealed shoe rack for the slightly pricier ones) is a common practise in a middle-class household. Well, at least in mine, it still is.

The issue of flooding has been the greatest concern among residents of Chennai over the last two monsoon cycles. Drains choked with plastic bags and shrinking open spaces cause water to stagnate on the roads with the lightest of rains. Besides the flooding, the cycle continues with the dangerous aedes aegypti mosquito making its home in stagnant water sources.

Chennai’s Waste Management Crisis

The garbage situation today

In January 2017, I joined CAG, specifically to work on solid waste management (SWM) projects. I started with the Mapping Waste Trails project, which aims to gain a better understanding of the lives of the informal waste pickers engaged in waste recycling in Chennai. Furthermore, we will be tracking the movements of certain recyclables, to ascertain the routes by which such materials traverse the city-scape, and the value added within each step in the routes.

The last day of the Break Free From Plastics meeting was kept for communications. How can we be more effective in getting across our stories to citizens, governments, and corporates? This session was led by Dancing Fox, a group that works to “help change makers tell their story, and help storytellers change the world”.