What do vendors actually know, do, and think about waste?

Walk through almost any street, beach, or market in Chennai and one thing is immediately visible: informal vendors. Tea carts at junctions, snack stalls near beaches, breakfast pushcarts in residential lanes, flower vendors outside temples, fish sellers near coastal stretches; they are woven into the fabric of daily city life, contributing to local economies and serving thousands of people every day.

They also generate a significant share of the city's public-space waste, like organic waste, single-use plastics, and packaging material; and when infrastructure is limited, or practices are inconsistent, much of this waste ends up on footpaths, in stormwater drains, on beaches, and eventually in the city's overburdened waste management system.

Urban waste management is often approached through infrastructure expansion and service delivery improvements, though in high-footfall public spaces, waste outcomes are shaped as much by behaviour as by systems. Despite this - their scale and visibility - there is surprisingly little systematic evidence on what vendors actually know about waste rules, what they actually do on the ground, and what they actually think about compliance, enforcement, and change.

That is precisely the gap CAG's WAVE (Waste Attitudes and Vendor Engagement) study set out to address.

What WAVE Is About

WAVE is a field-based study that deploys a rapid-assessment, Knowledge, Behaviour, and Attitudes (KBA) questionnaire to understand solid waste management among street-side and beach vendors in Chennai.  The goal is not to document violations or position vendors as the problem but to build an honest, evidence-based picture of what vendor-linked waste looks like, why it happens, and what realistic interventions could actually work.

The study is grounded in a straightforward premise: effective waste management in public spaces cannot be designed from behind a desk. It requires understanding the people who operate in those spaces, their awareness of rules, the constraints they face, the infrastructure available to them, and their willingness to change.

Where We Looked and Who We Spoke To

WAVE was conducted across eight areas in Chennai, deliberately selected to represent the diversity of vending environments across the city. These are organised into three clusters:

• Beach Areas: Marina Beach and Besant Nagar/Elliot's Beach, capturing high-footfall coastal vending with dense snack, food, and beverage stalls. The two locations also offer an important contrast - Marina's extremely high-intensity vending environment against Besant Nagar's comparatively moderate, evening-oriented character.
• Commercial Street-Side Corridors: T. Nagar (Pondy Bazaar), Purasawalkam High Road, and Broadway/Mint Street, representing different characters of urban commercial vending, from a major retail shopping area with high street food density to a traditional historic market corridor with different enforcement patterns.
• Neighbourhood and Local Areas: Perambur, Velachery and Virugambakkam, and Mylapore, covering working-class, emerging suburban, and heritage residential neighbourhoods respectively. These areas are particularly important for understanding how vendors behave outside commercial zones and in the absence of visible enforcement pressure.

This geographic spread was intentional. The study covers East Chennai (beaches), North (Perambur, Purasawalkam), North-West (Broadway), Central (T. Nagar), Central-South (Mylapore), South (Velachery), and West (Virugambakkam), ensuring that findings reflect the city's socio-economic and spatial diversity rather than just one kind of vending context.

The vendor categories covered include beach and coastal vendors, street-side food vendors, small fixed food outlets and tea shops, flower vendors, vegetable and fruit sellers, and fish and meat vendors, any vendor whose operations generate food-related or packaging waste in public spaces. In total, the study covered 295 vendors across all eight areas.

How the Data Was Collected

WAVE used three integrated data collection methods applied across all study areas. The first was a structured KBA survey administered to all 295 vendors. This covered vendor profiles, knowledge of SWM rules and plastic ban provisions, self-reported waste handling practices, attitudes towards regulations and enforcement, and openness to alternative packaging or training.

The second was an on-site behavioural observation checklist, also completed for all 295 vendors. Rather than relying solely on what vendors said they do, field investigators directly observed and recorded what was actually visible at each vendor location, waste storage practices, littering in the immediate vicinity, presence or absence of segregation, access to bins, and signs of collection or overflow. This pairing of survey with direct observation is what allows the study to distinguish between stated and actual behaviour.

The third was a rapid waste audit conducted with a purposive subsample of 74 vendors, approximately 25% of the total sample, distributed across all eight areas. The subsample focused on food and beverage sellers with higher waste generation. These audits involved direct categorisation of waste by type (organic, recyclable, mixed) and approximate weight, providing observed data on waste composition and quantities that can be cross-checked against self-reported practices.

Together, these three methods ensure that the study captures not just what vendors say, but what they do and what their waste actually looks like on the ground.

Field data collection is now complete across all 295 vendors and eight study areas. The data encoding and analysis phase is currently underway, with the final report expected to be ready by mid-April 2026.

What the Report Will Contain

The final WAVE report, which will be released in April 2026, will present a comprehensive KBA assessment analysing knowledge levels, waste-handling behaviours, attitudes, and barriers to compliance across vendor types and study clusters. Alongside this, a vendor typology and waste pattern analysis will examine how different categories of vendors generate waste differently and what tailored interventions would be appropriate for each. The report will also include an infrastructure and system gap analysis, documenting where bins are absent, where collection is inadequate, and where signage is missing across the eight study areas. Together, these will feed into a set of operational recommendations for GCC and partners, covering vendor engagement strategies, infrastructure improvements, and waste collection optimisation, all grounded in what the data actually shows.

Why This Matters

Chennai's waste management conversation tends to focus on infrastructure: bins, collection vehicles and processing facilities. These are important. But public-space cleanliness also depends on behaviour, and behaviour depends on a combination of knowledge, infrastructure, enforcement, and incentives.

By building an evidence base on what vendors know, what they do, and what they think, WAVE creates the foundation for interventions that are realistic rather than aspirational. It helps answer the question that is often skipped in urban waste planning: before telling people what to do, do we actually understand what is happening on the ground?

The findings will be relevant not just for waste management planning but for the broader conversation about how Chennai supports and integrates its informal vending economy into a cleaner, better-managed public environment.