CHENNAI: There’s so much plastic accumulated in my house’, ‘It starts stinking’, ‘Can I process wet plastic?’ These were some of the commonly heard remarks at an information session in the city on Sunday. Kabadiwalla Connect, an NGO that focuses on efficient waste disposal and recycling, took up the topic of segregation to set the ball rolling. The informal gathering took on both micro and macro level questions with an eclectic group of people including professors, college students, homemakers and office-goers.
Shanti, from Mahalingapuram, said her locality has no garbage strewn about and even their domestic help disposes waste using the segregation system. “The moment we see someone dump garbage, we tell them not to. It began at the apartment-level before our whole neighborhood took it up,” she said, adding that it wasn’t easy to start. “It took time, but now everyone is on board. Even the ward councillor has been very receptive towards the system,” she said.
“We need to start the conversation somewhere,” said Siddharth Hande, founder of Kabadiwala Connect, highlighting the need for a WhatsApp group to exchange ideas on segregation of household waste. “Garbage is only cleared, not sorted. The Corporation should be more specific about its waste management plans,” said IIT Madras professor emeritus T P Manohar. He added that the best practices for segregation should be adopted from Australia and Japan, where different types of garbage are disposed on different days, locality-wise. “We can start in one avenue, expand it to one locality, and scale it up from there,” he added.
Factfile