I was extremely excited about shadowing a
SWaCH member. I ended up shadowing a husband and wife – both of whom are SWaCH
waste-pickers. I shadowed Dilip, the husband, for the first half of the day,
and his wife Supriya for the second half of the day.
Neither of them spoke any
English, so I was not able to ask questions or bring up comments or
observations until afterward when I went over the experience with my adviser
and other SWaCH members. It was an extraordinary experience that I will never
forget and it gave me invaluable insight into the power of belonging to a
cooperative such as SWaCH.
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| SWaCH (Solid Waste Collection and Handling), where I interned during my semester abroad! |
Dilip and Supriya are a married couple who have been
waste-picking their whole lives. Becoming members of SWaCH changed their lives
completely. Dilip was able to get a small truck – a tempo – which gives him
enormous capabilities that most waste-pickers only dream of. Dilip and Supriya
are wealthy as far as waste-pickers go, and have managed to put their three
sons through school and beyond. The oldest son is twenty-two and is studying to
be a police officer. They may not be well-off, but they are also not just
scraping by day-to-day.
He
picked me up in his little blue truck and we were off to his first stop of the
day – a Toyota Dealer in Pune. For seven thousand rupees per month, Dilip takes
care of all of the waste for this entire operation. I wanted to talk to the
manager about his experience working with SWaCH, and he explained, delightedly,
that he switched to SWaCH because he knew that they have the capacity to
recycle. The previous private company he hired to collect the waste did not
necessarily recycle everything, and he felt compelled to move his company
towards a greener future. I asked him why he felt so compelled do take this
step, and he showed me an email that he had sent out to all of his employees
that outlined the Swatch Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India) movement, and how Toyota
would be complying with its principles. He wanted to give his company a good
name in light of all this, and thought that moving toward a greener waste
management process was a good start. I asked him how much and what kinds of
waste his dealership produces, and he said that it is mostly organic waste, of
which most is food waste – approximately ninety to one hundred kilograms per
day. Dry waste accounts for about ten to fifteen kilograms per day.
After rounding up all this waste, Dilip and I got back
into the little blue truck and went to the “sorting shed” – if you can even
classify it as that. It was in reality a pile of garbage on the side of a
semi-busy road with no privacy and no coverage. The dry waste that he had
collected would be sorted through at the end of his work day, and the wet waste
would be given to a biogas plant.
It was at the sorting shed that I met his wife, Supriya,
for the first time. She was a ball of beaming energy that was incredibly warm
and absolutely delightful from the moment we met. Supriya and I walked to the
housing society from which she collects household garbage. She pushed her
pushcart with two large garbage bins in it – one for wet waste and one for dry
waste – in front of her, and lovingly but firmly held my hand tightly at every
street we crossed.
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| Supriya and her SWaCH waste collection cart, with one bin for wet waste and one bin for dry waste |
The housing society from which she collected waste had
about two hundred stand-alone homes (i.e. not bungalows or apartments) and she
collected the garbage from most of them in about ninety minutes, which was very
impressive. Most had put their waste out in front of their homes, but some kept
it inside. She knew everyone, for the most part, on a first name basis, and
greeted everyone with a huge smile.
Most of the households had segregated their waste to a
basic degree, but it was done pretty carelessly most of the time from what I
observed. Supriya spent probably an extra half hour or more by the end of the
collection segregating wet from dry waste. It was during this that I saw
first-hand the enormous importance of segregating household waste; had the
people taken that extra half second to carefully segregate their waste at the
source – in the kitchen, in the bathroom, and in the yard or garden – Supriya
would have saved a lot of time as well as some dignity by not having to sort
through other people’s garbage more than was absolutely necessary for her job.
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| Me, Supriya, Dilip (back right) and a Pune Municipal Council (PMC) worker who came to pick up the day's non-recyclables to bring to the landfill |
The people who I interacted with that lived in the homes
Supriya was collecting from were all very fond of SWaCH and satisfied with
their experience thus far. Many were very confused by my presence, of course,
and a few were slightly annoyed that I was studying a garbage system that was,
according to one man, “a complete mess.” He began genuinely telling me that
they – India – should be learning from us, instead of me learning from them. I
politely explained that the U.S. has a garbage crisis, too, and that it is
simply more hidden than the garbage crisis in India, which is unabashedly out
in the open. He wasn’t especially interested in that, though.
One woman that Supriya collected garbage from was
extremely interested in what I was doing and wanted to know all about my
project and my observations on the Pune waste system. She gave me lots of TED
talks to watch and articles to read and brochures to go through, and by the end
Supriya had to tear us apart. I asked her what her experience with SWaCH
waste-pickers specifically was and she replied with, “they are our heroes,
actually.”
Supriya did other things besides just collect the wet and
dry waste from people’s homes. Some homes – about five or six – had composting
facilities outside their home that Supriya turned. A few were vermicomposting
units – which is the use of earthworms to convert organic waste into fertilizer
– and a few were just regular composting units. She also swept the walkways to
some houses and picked up any trash she saw littered outside of the property.
I was surprised by the ignorance of some people who had
well-meaning intentions. The first example of this was a young woman who seemed
to be an activist in waste-picker welfare issues. She explained to me that she
does not give Supriya plastics because she knows that waste-pickers have to
manually go through plastics to sort them into sup-categories. She did not want
to make Supriya do this, so she sold her plastic recyclables directly to a
scrap dealer. Though her intentions in this act were dutiful and
well-intentioned, she missed the point completely that Supriya makes half her
income off of selling these plastics and other recyclable material to the scrap
dealer. Though she was saving Supriya from manual labor, she failed to
understand that this is, alas, how Supriya makes her living – whether this
woman wants it to be this way or not. Being properly educated about how SWaCH
works and how waste-pickers work is vital, and it was frustrating – yet
understandable – that many people had not taken the time to accurately educate
themselves.
When Supriya was done collecting waste from these two
hundred homes or so, we made our way back to the “sorting shed” where I had met
her earlier. We met up with Dilip, who had already begun the sorting for the
day. There was also another married couple who was busy sorting at the same
place. The other woman knew some English, and we were able to talk a little bit
with this and my limited Marathi.
Supriya
began the day’s sorting here. Waste-pickers sort waste into several categories,
depending on the content of that day’s trash: plastic, paper/cardboard, cloth,
leather, metal, and more. Each of these categories gets further sub-divided
according to its recyclability and what kinds of things it will be made into in
its next life. Plastic, for example, is divided into three main categories,
initially: Main, which consists of
all kinds of colored plastic bags; kadkad,
which consists of PET bottles, Bisleri and other manufactured drinking bottles,
plastic jars, ice creams cups, and other things of this nature; phuga, which consists of dirty/broken
plastic bottles, low grade plastic, broken plastic toys, old oil bottles,
shampoo bottles, and other things like this.[1]
Different piles are made according to this system, and the waste-picker will
get different rates for each type of recyclable. A waste picker will store the
recyclables in the sorting shed (or wherever she can find room) and bring them
to a scrap dealer about once a week.
I had the opportunity to go to Supriya’s house after the
day was over. The slums of Pune are interesting places with a wide variety in
terms of living conditions. The small house was home to her, Dilip, their three
sons, Supriya’s brother and his family of four, and Supriya’s sister and her
family of four. Thirteen people were living in this house, which had a total of
three rooms. It was a pretty crazy thing to witness.
After this we walked back to SWaCH and she dropped me
there. It was a truly amazing day that I will never, ever forget, and I am
forever grateful for Dilip and Supriya’s kindness and openness.
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