Welcome to another Trash Talking Friday, the only trash talk that can boil an egg by just looking at it!
Each week, I send you Ideas to ponder about. Ideas that have the potential to change your life, and hopefully help you become a better human being by understanding yourself.
This week I talk about, 1) why pay for waste disposal service 2) how improper waste disposal effects are hidden 3) waste services must be considered a utility.
Let’s get into it!
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Why Pay For Waste Disposal Services?
Do you charge for garbage collection? Will you pay me for my waste and recyclables? If I got a dollar for every time I have been asked these two questions in my 15 years as a garbage collector, I would be chilling in the Bahamas with an exotic cocktail, a reusable steel straw and maybe Halley Berry! Not really, I did the math and it only works out $21,900 so Halley Berry and the Bahamas are out but a life time of beer supply and reusable steel straws are in!
As someone who runs a waste management company, I have thought about this often, trying to figure out the reason behind this, trying to relate it to other essential utility services such as water, electricity and gas where you must pay for what you use or the service gets disconnected (unless of course you are living off the grid, make your own bio gas & bathe, brush & clean yourself with rain water that you have harvested). I also often get the rebuttal, “but you are earning from the waste I give you”, while others say “I pay my taxes, it’s the governments responsibility to collect my trash”.
Here is why I think this mentality exists & what needs to be done to change it:
1. I can dispose it myself: Making your own electricity or drilling for water at home is not easy. Even if you invest in solar, the upfront costs are substantial along with the fact that you will still need to be connected to the gird or use a generator to meet peak energy requirements. But the waste that you generate at your homes, can simply just be disposed of at the neighbourhood dump & in many cases just chucked out of your balconies or windows, given to the house help to throw in deserted empty plots or drains. Out of site out of mind, with little realization that the growing heaps of garbage around our communities, cities and the massive open dumps that we see on the outskirts of our cities have part of consumption buried in them. Stealing electricity is a crime, with heavy fines and jail terms in place, but dumping garbage in the open and not segregating it is rarely fined, if caught you can get away with a minor slap on the wrist of rupees 500.
2. The effects are hidden & not immediate: The out of sight, out of mind mentality in regards to waste disposal means that it gives you a false sense of assurance that the waste has been dealt with, its off your hands and now some one else’s responsibility. Remember, just because it’s been collected or disposed does not mean that it’s been processed or dealt with in a sustainable manner. In short, we can live with the inconvenience of storing waste at home for three to four days if it’s not collected (dry waste can be stored for months if you have the space), post which we would resort to action as per point number one, or have a local sanitation worker remove it for us for a small fee. Unlike the lack of electricity or water, effects of which we feel immediately the effects of improper disposal and management of waste are mostly hidden from the general public at large. From visual pollution, to stench, from our water bodies being polluted to global warming, from you and your kids breathing toxic air, your waste has a growing role to play in all of these problems.
The effects of improper disposal and management of waste are not immediate, rather they are long term and dangerous, both on your health and your finances. Feeling out of breath, got dengue, have high levels of toxins in your body? Many of you don’t realise that your waste is a big part of these problems. Why? Because we don’t ask the right questions and dig deep enough to understand the underlining cause of problems at hand. The effects of improper disposal and management of waste are not advertised enough either. We are just told that we need to segregate and dispose our waste properly, why we need to do that is missing. A pack of cigarettes carries a stern and prominent warning to the effects of smoking on your health, unfortunately improper disposal or management of waste has no such warning, but the long-term effects are as deadly if not more for those who smoke and those who don’t.
The financial costs of waste can be measured by how clean your community is. Believe it or not, sanitation has a huge role to play in property prices. In recent times, there has been an exodus of people leaving the country or moving to the hills or smaller towns like Goa, in search for a better quality of life. Would you pay top dollar to live in a community that’s filthy? This is also evident within neighborhoods. Areas that are cleaner, will demand a premium in rent or sale prices of homes than areas that are dirty. Then there is the cost to your health, which cannot be measured, the burden of which, both financial and emotional can be over welling and destructive.
3. It’s not considered a utility: Reverting back to the question that I get asked often times “do you charge for garbage collection? Will you pay me for my garbage since you will earn from it? Waste management unlike electricity, water or gas in not considered a utility. The missing sense of you paying for something hence you must receive something of value in return is a major reason why many hesitate or are unwilling to pay for waste disposal services. But what if I told you that this service gives you the gift of a healthy future. The gift of a cleaner environment for your future generations, a gift that your body can feel, that your mind can cherish and that your conscience can live with.
Further, most people don’t realize how capital- and labor-intensive waste management is. From collection to processing, it all costs money to do things the right way. The irony of the situation is that waste is being utilised to produce electricity, cooking gas & CNG the very same products that we happily pay for without asking why? Weather delivered through private enterprise, the government or a mix of both, this service needs to be labelled a critical utility service that consumers need to pay much more for than many pay as of now.
There are many other deep rooted cultural and mind set challenges pertaining to individuals not wanting to pay for waste disposal services which I will leave for a future article. What we need to realize is that ultimately, it’s our waste and we must take accountability to manage it. India is still a developing nation, its government is stretched for finances, corruption is rampant and the state of affairs of our municipal bodies is there for all to see. Our taxes should take care of many things, but unfortunately they don’t. Majority don’t pay taxes and with a bulging population which is increasingly relying on government handouts to survive or in many cases just to milk the system, it becomes critical that we as individuals take responsibility of the direction in which our country is headed. No one is coming to save you or our environment, its up to every individual to do their part to make our future sustainable.
Adios until we meet again next week! Have a fabulously sustainable weekend!