Eco India: Can decentralised efforts be the answer to Bengaluru's waste problems?

This garbage heap in Bengaluru's JC Nagar sits next to 36-year-old Umar's house. Despite getting cleared two to three times a day, Umar tells us it doesn't seem to go away. When the road is blocked, all the garbage gets dumped on the road. Last time, someone came here and dumped all the garbage on the road. They slipped and fell in the car. That was the last time I came here. It was so cold. Black spots like these are illegal garbage dumping sites. Bengaluru is officially bin-less, which means there are no public bins for dumping garbage. Yet, you will find black spots strewn across more than 800 areas in the city today. Every day, Bengaluru generates between 5,000 to 6,000 metric tons of waste. Nearly 60% of this wet waste that could have been composted. But because much of this remains unsegregated, they end up disrupting waste management systems. Food scraps contaminate recyclables, reducing their value and undermining formal waste processing. Consequently, they end up as black spots across the city. You see, if you open this, there's an aluminium foil in most of these containers. Johanna is a college student and a regular plogger. The popular practice of collecting waste while one is out on walks or runs. Actually, I have a plant garden, a terrace garden at my home. So, all the wet waste that we generate, I put it as manure to my plants. And the dry waste, I actually keep it in a bag. We actually give those things to them because they recycle them. One cannot call Johanna an exception. It is not that citizens of Bengaluru remain unaware of good waste management practices. Estimates say that 40 to 50% of the city already segregates. But the problem, Bengaluru resident G. Nagaraj reckons, are systemic gaps and a lack of commitment. Nagaraj routinely conducts plogging sessions in the city. I would say there's hardly anybody who doesn't know that littering is bad or something like that. It's nothing to do with knowledge as such. People now know that there is an effect directly. And lots and lots of evidence is there on climate change, climate action, because you're actually feeling it. Second is the lack of commitment. For example, individual houses, smaller houses, where the difficulty is there in terms of waste vehicles coming on time. So, especially when both husband and wife are working, they wouldn't mind unfortunately just putting it in one corner of the city and go off because one, of the time constraints. Second is on the lack of commitment. They at least bother what happens to that. My house is clean. Why should I be bothered about this? Bengaluru has a network of about 8,000 auto tippers, the collection vehicles in the city. But as Sunita Jayaram, director at a social enterprise for waste solutions, points out, there are gaps in the collection systems that add to the problem. So, generally, black spots tend to arise when waste is not handed over to the collection vehicle. So, the reason could be that they don't want to segregate their waste or they don't want to give their waste when the collection vehicle is coming, even if they are there. Or a genuine reason where people leave for work very early and return from work very late. Now, first two issues that I told could be addressed with penalisation, with repeated intervention by officials. But I would say in low-income communities, there are a lot of challenges there with narrow roads, people not available because they leave for work very early. When waste collection vehicle comes, they are not available. In one part of South Bengaluru, at HSR Layout, a prime residential area, a new system is taking shape. On a calm Monday morning, the auto-tippers here are on their collection grounds and the process seems smooth. This is primarily because segregation rates here are at close to 90%. HSR Citizen Forum member, Padmashree Mahesh, attributes this success to the residents. We took one step at a time. First, we went with the awareness. So after that, slowly we started doing composting awareness. Then next, the plastic ban jumped in. Simultaneously here, I will tell, mainly due to the citizen participation only. 15 tonnes of wet waste is processed in this locality every month. While the waste from the rest of the city travels 20 to 30 kilometres to a landfill, here, it needs to go nowhere. 20 in-situ aerobic composters process wet waste from 750 households within the premises. Every day, morning 6.30 to 6.30, 7 o'clock, our vehicle's wet collection starts. When the wet comes, then the cocoa peat, then the old coconut and shredded dry leaves are mixed. They are mixed, layered and put inside this. Wherever we have placed the lane composters, that house has a CC camera. Which is easy for us to identify so that no one will come and dump. So that is why here, block composting became very easy. So once it is matured and we harvest the compost, they use it for their own plants to grow. So it's very easy and simple. This has to be replicated all over Bangalore for better management of the garbage. The idea is simple. Process waste where it is generated and teach others how to do it. HSR Layout does not just stop with practising local composting. They also teach. This is the Swachh Graha Kalika Kendra, or SGKK, located at the HSR Layout. The country's first, a one-of-a-kind learning centre for waste management. Because what we are teaching here is aerobic composting. Established in 2018, the SGKK demonstrates 10 vendor-based and several DIY composting models. And these workshops are open to all. The easiest and the most effective way is to do composting at home. Because we generate about 60-65% of the waste that we generate is food waste or kitchen waste. And it came from soil and it should go back into the soil. And if it can go back into the soil at the place where it is generated, that is at home, then the waste will not travel 20-25 kilometres to the landfill. And it reduces the burden on centralised processing systems or landfills. The second method is community composting. That is at an apartment level, institution, organisation, municipality, all of them actually they can compost the waste that is generated. That is at a community level. Bangalore is known for community composting or apartment level composting. The third one is a large-scale composting at a ward level. Dig open 4 feet depth and then about 8-10 feet. For composting enthusiasts like Preethi Sripalsan, a hands-on learning experience has made it worth making this trip all the way from Kerala. To come to a place, see it, experience it, is definitely different from learning things from YouTube. So if there is an option, if there is no opportunity to go and see a place like that directly, then you don't have a choice. But when there is an option, I think the group should be brought here and people should be made to see all this and feel it and then understand. You see the compost on YouTube, you know, feel it, how it is. So that makes a difference. This is also from me, this is also from me. So this is also raw material. Not just individuals, the school has also inspired municipal corporations from other cities in the country. We did a session with elected representatives of Telangana state and they have seen and they went back and they replicated this completely end-to-end for their municipality. They established a knowledge centre, a learning centre also, which is called Swachh Badi. Evidently, a trickle-down effect of the HSR layout model is making its way slowly across the city. At the Temple Bells Apartments in Rajarajeshwari Nagar, 900 residents generate nearly 600 kilograms of wet waste each day. But until 2023, residents used to hand it over to private vendors. When we really witnessed that what the vendor does with this waste, that was the tipping point for us. He used to collect the waste, although there was some set of segregation which used to happen at the source, he used to mix all of it and dump it in an unknown location. Initially, to ensure there is 100% segregation, we divided the days into a dry waste collection day and a wet waste collection day. So, by virtue of alternating the days itself and the collection days, you make sure that the apartment owners and residents, basically, it gets into their muzzle memory. Breaking habits, Apchal tells us, has been the real challenge in bringing about change. This took almost three months. It took us to really make sure the residents segregate the waste at the source. Second aspect was, we also got our housekeeping staff trained, teaching them how to say no. That was very important. Whenever the waste is mixed, you have to learn to say no and then you will not collect it. One of the more tangible benefits for residents here has been cutting down expenses to almost one-fourth of what the city was charging as tax for processing its waste. From 3 lakh rupees a month, the apartment now spends 80,000 rupees. Apart from earning from the compost they produce. The key is to handle the waste of the entire city, right? The key is decentralized waste processing. And that's where it really comes down to the community level. If every community has this as a priority, basically, in fact, the good part in Bangalore is, for every problem, you have a solution. It's just that you need to seek out the right people. Bangalore's waste crisis is far from resolved. The infrastructure for waste processing needs expansion. Collection systems must adapt to an ever-growing city. But one thing seems clear. Decentralization is practical. And citizen participation can shift outcomes. In a city that produces thousands of tons of waste each day, the solution does not lie in bigger landfills, but in smaller, local systems. Wad by wad, street by street, home by home.