I had planned to name this post, "Three Really Stupid Ideas," but I've decided instead to write about one really stupid idea and one pretty good idea that will almost certainly deliver less than it promises. As for the other two really stupid ideas, well, you'll just have to wait a few days for those.
The Delhi High Court ruled last week that local authorities must once again enforce a ruling the Supreme Court made back in 2000. Though this ruling will affect other industries as well, the Indian Express makes it clear that it is aimed at plastic recyclers in particular. I've been thinking a lot about the plastic recycling industry since I reviewed Of Poverty and Plastic and interviewed its author, Kaveri Gill, last month. If previous experience is any guide, this ruling will fail to bring an end to plastic recycling. It will, however, cause a great deal of needless hardship to people who have enough hardship already.
It is common knowledge that Delhi does an exceptionally poor job at managing it's solid waste. There is litter everywhere, but more than that, there are large sections of the city where formal solid waste management and recycling systems are nonexistent.
We would literally be drowning in trash if it were not for the informal sector: the waste pickers, the kabadi wallas, the traders and the small recycling factories that do much of the work that the state takes responsibility for in most other countries.
This is not a perfect system, but it can boast impressive achievements. India recycles 60-80% of it's post-consumer plastic, as compared with 7% in Europe and 10% in China. Most of this recycling takes place in Delhi, making our city the de facto recycling capital of the world. The benefits of all this recycling means less use of petroleum, but it also means that poor people all over the country have access to inexpensive plastic products: buckets, mugs, footwear, and more. And the plastic recycling industry has created lakhs of jobs that would otherwise not exist.
It is true that the recycled plastic industry pollutes. So does the new plastic industry, and so does burying plastic in the ground. But three points should be made. First, the government has never followed through on it's plans to relocate this industry in a systematic and sustainable manner. If this industry must move, then a well-organized, humane approach would be the way to do it. Second, many factory owners have made efforts to reduce their environmental impact. Sealing them up and scattering them even further from the center of Delhi will simply shift pollution to new areas--where things may be worse. Third, arbitrary and sudden government sweeps like the ones that devastated this industry a decade ago are unlikely to end plastic recycling, but they are almost certain to cause enormous amounts of suffering in an industry that is already marginal and risky in the best of times.
Let's Do it! Delhi
Perhaps the justices of the High Court felt they could get away with such a drastic attack on the industry that helps keep Delhi as clean as it is because they've read about the Let's Do It! Delhi campaign, which aims to clean up Delhi in just one day on March 20. A similar campaign worked in Estonia, organizers say! Why not Delhi?
I'm sorry, but I think this is such a sweet idea. In fact, Mrs. Batti has me and the kids signed up for some kind of clean up work on that day, and I'm really looking forward to it. You should sign up, too! But I have to confess that every time I hear the Delhi effort compared to the Estonian campaign, I find myself giggling uncontrollably! Please, don't take this the wrong way! I hate litter. I don't litter-- I even pick up other people's litter sometimes, which, I might add, almost always embarrasses my children. But I watched a video about what happened in Estonia, and I just have to break this to you: DELHI is NOT ESTONIA!
The Let's Do It! Estonia campaign was amazing. In the weeks leading up to their one-day clean up drive, they used GPS gizmos to map out every pile of trash in the country. The airwaves were flooded with free public service announcements featuring all kinds of famous Estonians. On the day of the clean up, Estonia, a country of 1.3 million people, produced 50,000 volunteers, who cleaned up 10,000 tons of trash. Wow! Those guys are serious about cleanliness! So what if most of that trash went to landfills, not recycling centers--you really have to give them credit for doing an incredible job.
The Let's Do It! Delhi organizers are impressive and hard working. They are doing a very good thing. I support them. But no matter how we try, we will not be able to clean up Delhi in one day. To approach the level of civic involvement that the Estonians had, Let's Do It! Delhi would need to mobilize more than a half million volunteers on March 20. To be successful, they would have already had to have mapped every trash pile in every slum and public park, and all the plastic floating in every nallah and river in the city. And, of course, the MCD would have to have laid the ground work for a trash collection system throughout Delhi so that those piles of trash wouldn't just reappear next month.
Of course the fact that we will fail does not mean we should not try. But there is too much irony here to go unspoken: this month, as people from all over Delhi come together to spend a day picking up litter, the courts have put at risk the livelihoods the lakhs of hard working men and women who spend all of their days collecting and recycling our trash for us. Let's do it better than this, Delhi!
It is common knowledge that Delhi does an exceptionally poor job at managing it's solid waste. There is litter everywhere, but more than that, there are large sections of the city where formal solid waste management and recycling systems are nonexistent.
We would literally be drowning in trash if it were not for the informal sector: the waste pickers, the kabadi wallas, the traders and the small recycling factories that do much of the work that the state takes responsibility for in most other countries. This is not a perfect system, but it can boast impressive achievements. India recycles 60-80% of it's post-consumer plastic, as compared with 7% in Europe and 10% in China. Most of this recycling takes place in Delhi, making our city the de facto recycling capital of the world. The benefits of all this recycling means less use of petroleum, but it also means that poor people all over the country have access to inexpensive plastic products: buckets, mugs, footwear, and more. And the plastic recycling industry has created lakhs of jobs that would otherwise not exist.
It is true that the recycled plastic industry pollutes. So does the new plastic industry, and so does burying plastic in the ground. But three points should be made. First, the government has never followed through on it's plans to relocate this industry in a systematic and sustainable manner. If this industry must move, then a well-organized, humane approach would be the way to do it. Second, many factory owners have made efforts to reduce their environmental impact. Sealing them up and scattering them even further from the center of Delhi will simply shift pollution to new areas--where things may be worse. Third, arbitrary and sudden government sweeps like the ones that devastated this industry a decade ago are unlikely to end plastic recycling, but they are almost certain to cause enormous amounts of suffering in an industry that is already marginal and risky in the best of times.
Let's Do it! Delhi
Perhaps the justices of the High Court felt they could get away with such a drastic attack on the industry that helps keep Delhi as clean as it is because they've read about the Let's Do It! Delhi campaign, which aims to clean up Delhi in just one day on March 20. A similar campaign worked in Estonia, organizers say! Why not Delhi?
I'm sorry, but I think this is such a sweet idea. In fact, Mrs. Batti has me and the kids signed up for some kind of clean up work on that day, and I'm really looking forward to it. You should sign up, too! But I have to confess that every time I hear the Delhi effort compared to the Estonian campaign, I find myself giggling uncontrollably! Please, don't take this the wrong way! I hate litter. I don't litter-- I even pick up other people's litter sometimes, which, I might add, almost always embarrasses my children. But I watched a video about what happened in Estonia, and I just have to break this to you: DELHI is NOT ESTONIA!
The Let's Do It! Estonia campaign was amazing. In the weeks leading up to their one-day clean up drive, they used GPS gizmos to map out every pile of trash in the country. The airwaves were flooded with free public service announcements featuring all kinds of famous Estonians. On the day of the clean up, Estonia, a country of 1.3 million people, produced 50,000 volunteers, who cleaned up 10,000 tons of trash. Wow! Those guys are serious about cleanliness! So what if most of that trash went to landfills, not recycling centers--you really have to give them credit for doing an incredible job.
The Let's Do It! Delhi organizers are impressive and hard working. They are doing a very good thing. I support them. But no matter how we try, we will not be able to clean up Delhi in one day. To approach the level of civic involvement that the Estonians had, Let's Do It! Delhi would need to mobilize more than a half million volunteers on March 20. To be successful, they would have already had to have mapped every trash pile in every slum and public park, and all the plastic floating in every nallah and river in the city. And, of course, the MCD would have to have laid the ground work for a trash collection system throughout Delhi so that those piles of trash wouldn't just reappear next month. Of course the fact that we will fail does not mean we should not try. But there is too much irony here to go unspoken: this month, as people from all over Delhi come together to spend a day picking up litter, the courts have put at risk the livelihoods the lakhs of hard working men and women who spend all of their days collecting and recycling our trash for us. Let's do it better than this, Delhi!
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