Solid Waste Management

Beyond Eye recently conducted an hour-long workshop with 170 adolescents from three schools of Uttarakhand – Jagdae, Kotachami and Jindalu. The objective of this workshop was to educate youth on different kinds of waste and to make them understand the importance of its segregation.

The rationale behind this workshop was:

• These villages have good connectivity with cities which has resulted in easy importing of industrial materials. Further, this has also led to big industries entering the village spaces which has resulted in an increase in the production of waste.
• Every house has been given a dustbin under the ‘Swach Bharat Abhiyaan’ campaign. However, this has not resulted in any utilization of these dustbins. Rather, the waste of the household continues to be fed to the cattle and dry waste, burnt. There is also no disposal system at place for dry waste like plastics, bottles, wrappers, e-waste.
• There is not much knowledge about segregation of waste and ways to recycle dry waste. There are no public dustbins in these villages to gather all the dry waste from market and home. This results in people throwing the waste on roads or on the barren land.
• There is no system of collecting the waste.

We did an hour-long workshop which consisted of presentation and games as a tool to educate youth on solid waste management. We brought in two expert trainers – Dev S. Hari and Priyanka Rawat, who informed the adolescents about the three kinds of dustbins – food waste only, recyclable, and non-recyclable. Facilitators then showed students the different kinds of waste products like plastics, food waste, diapers, batteries, etc.They informed them about waste segregation, the time taken by different categories of waste to degrade as well as the harmful effects of waste. Students were also made aware about the different ways of recycling waste, incineration methods for waste disposal and landfill sites.