With recognition from countries like the USA and Australia, the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC)-Swach collaboration waste management model has often been the talk of the town. Waste management – its collection, segregation, recycling etc – is still a concern for many cities globally. Crores are spent on the same every year with little reform in many cases. Setting itself apart from the rest of the country, the PMC has entered a collaboration with the Swach cooperative since 2008, and changed the way waste is treated. What is Swach? In 2005, the Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat, in collaboration with SNDT University, implemented a door-to-door waste collection service by waste pickers in Pune on a small scale. A cooperative was thus formed for the waste pickers, and Swach came about in 2007. In 2008, Swach entered a collaboration with PMC and set up this model, and it has been in place ever since. Swach is responsible for about 90% of the city’s waste and it is the cooperative which collects and segregates it. Today, there are about 3,750 waste pickers working under Swach and servicing lakhs of households. Around 1,500 tonnes of waste is collected everyday in the city, out of which 200 tonnes is directly sent for recycling. This move has essentially cut down the amount of waste going for dumping, and streamlined segregation and recycling processes to a great extent.. How Does it Work? Swach has thousands of waste pickers working under them, 70% of them women, who collect waste from each doorstep daily. They are provided with push carts, bins and protective gear by the PMC. This waste is usually segregated between dry waste and wet waste by the households themselves. The waste pickers further segregate all the dry waste from their collections into different categories and on a weekly basis, sell the recyclables. The wet waste goes for composting, and the remaining waste is sent to PMC for processing. In this model, the waste pickers have two sources of income – a PMC-mandated fee that each household pays to the waste pickers, and the money that they receive from recycling. The model is essentially decentralised, and has made it beneficial for the public in terms of waste management and the waste pickers in terms of their livelihoods. What Else is Swach Involved In? Apart from the waste management model, Swach is also involved in many other activities. The cooperative started a campaign in Pune for separating sanitary waste and giving it to the waste pickers marked with a red dot. This campaign gained traction and led to Procter & Gamble starting the country’s first plant to process and break down sanitary waste in Pune. Due to Swach’s efforts, ITC, which is the largest producer of Multi Layered Plastics (MLPs), has set up a plant to break these down. MLPs are among the world’s biggest polluters. Swach also periodically sends thermocol and other recyclable materials to labs where they are processed, and they also conduct large donation and reuse drives. According to Harshad Barde, director of Swach, its efforts, in collaboration with PMC, have ensured one of the largest amounts of waste being segregated in the country, if not the world. This model is massively beneficial to the PMC as they save around Rs 120 crores per annum, by not giving contracts of waste management to private players. Along with being an environmentally viable model, it has also uplifted the lives of many working under it.
28 Aug 2023
Janhavi Deshmukh
