The small village of Siluk in the East Siang district of Arunachal Pradesh1 became a ‘zero waste’ village in 2021. The concerted efforts for recycling and composting of waste in the were led by the Gram panchayat, village faculties and students from the local schools and colleges and women involved in self-help groups.

Down south, Mannivakkam, a village in the Chengalpattu district of Tamil Nadu became a zero garbage village, with the establishment of a micro compost yard, ensuring complete source segregation of organic and inorganic wastes. The panchayat in the village is also set to install a water treatment system for the wastewater generated from kitchens and toilets.

In the neighboring state of Kerala, the city of Alappuzha has earned international recognition for revolutionary municipal solid waste management. With intense awareness programmes and active community participation, the organic compost pits were installed across Alappuzha, leading to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and setting an example of a scalable model for the rest of the country.

Traveling back to the north, a small village of Jaramkhuria in Assam, also got the tag of the zero-waste village very recently. With the help of local NGOs and citizen groups, the villagers are involved in segregating waste into four groups: plastic, glass, metal, and paper, along with maintaining a compost pit. Their initiatives also revolve around boosting sales for local bamboo artisans, which provide a strong alternative to plastic goods.

In the west of India, Ambapur village in Gandhinagar has earned fame as a zero-waste village, all due to the efforts made by local NGOs, crowd funding, and student volunteers from a regional college.

Not just citizen groups and local government bodies, even spiritual organizations have played a crucial role in waste management. The village of Padupanambur village in Karnataka was adopted by Ramakrishna Mission a few years back to transform it into a zero-waste village. The Mission has previously been involved in organizing the Swachh Mangalore programme. Across the country, the zero-landfill model is gaining relevance rampantly; To ensure that the maximum amount of waste is scientifically treated and recycled, the eliminator needs new landfills.

 As per NITI Aayog’s report, Chhattisgarh’s Ambikapur, Maharashtra’s Chandrapur, and Kerala’s Taliparambastand as the models for waste management practices. Just like Siang, in Ambikapur, the intervention was made by the local administration and women’s self-help groups, ensuring 100 percent segregation, collection and processing of waste.

In Indore (Madhya Pradesh), the active awareness campaigns have been successful in bringing behavioural change among the citizens, making it the cleanest city in India, six times in a row.

Cities are experimenting and adopting efficient ways to segregate waste, and extirpate landfills and single-use plastic. In its quest to deal with waste management, Indian cities and villages are setting examples of best practices for the rest of the world. With the Swachh Bharat Mission 2.0 goal of garbage-free India, the concept of a ‘zero-garbage’ city is in full growth across the length and breadth of the country. Panaji, Mysuru, Gangtok, Pune and Jamshedpur, to mention a few are setting role models for practices of source segregation, biodegradable, plastic, and e-waste management.

Governments at all levels of the federal structure are leveraging new technology to solve the waste management problem, by inviting indigenous tech-enabled solutions and promoting start-ups in waste management. AGNIi Mission, a flagship initiative of the Government of India, is actively supporting Bhabha Atomic Research Centre which has developed scalable, highly energy efficient, and cost-effective e-waste recycling technologies, in transferring technologies to companies in e-waste market space in India.

With all the examples, it is evident that both rural and urban areas are constantly challenging the linear economy model of take-make-dispose, rampantly resorting to the circular economy based on the idea of zero waste production. The circular economy is a way of replicating the way nature works. As nothing goes to waste in nature, one thing converts into another, similarly in a circular economy, using biomimetics, we ensure that everything goes back to nature without harming its equilibrium.

Moreover, it is important to note that it is environmentalism at the local level flushed by the spirits of democracy that have shown many impressive results across India. Implementation of local policies at the district, village, or panchayat level, and finding locally suitable sustainable and green town planning have ensured better functioning of the circular economy. Motivating its citizens to embrace segregation as the only way, involvement of multiple stakeholders, use of technologies like real-time tracking systems for waste management, and hyper-localisation of waste management are the ingredients helping in India’s stride towards a zero waste era.

Democratisation of pro-planet behaviour, with a multi-stakeholders approach, has proven a successful recipe for achieving zero-waste goals in India. The extremely important role is being played by the local governments, citizen participation, self-help groups, and NGOs across India is well-evident from the zero-waste success stories emerging from India.

Source ANI