“Throw it away”, we say when we are done with something, when we don’t want it anymore or, when it’s broken. Can we pause to think that there actually is no “away”? Every product and package we use remains somewhere on this earth – in the land, the water or, in the air – when we are done with it.
For the last two years we’ve been trying to trace where some of our school garbage goes, to find out where is this “away”. The 9th and 10th standard students spent a day out on a field trip visiting a rivers exhibition near the Vrishabhavati and two waste sorting centres.
On the banks of the Vrishabhavathi River we stood quietly taking in the site of the black swirling waters, the strange harvest of clothes hanging on trees bowing down to the river with their sodden burden and, the odours of the upstream human settlements.
This left a mark as we moved on to the indoor rivers exhibition nearby. There we learned about industrial effluent upstream laced with cadmium entering the river; the baby corn industry using these very waters for their crops; and studied a model of all the activities along the drainage basin of this river.
The next stop was Swaccha Eco Solutions where we saw how plastic waste from factories is reprocessed into tiles and drip irrigation piping. Commendable as this may be, it requires energy and water and sadly, the volume of reprocessing in no way matches the output of this kind of waste.
Our final stop was at the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) waste segregation centre where we take the school’s dry waste. Here we are heartened to see that segregated household wet waste is composted and sold. And segregated dry waste is further sorted into types and recycled into other products.
We learnt that anything that’s not clean, dry waste or, of mixed material goes to cement factories to burn (instead of coal) and, that mixed waste must go to land fill. Sadly, an unfortunately large amount is in these categories.
So next time we throw something ‘away’, we might need to remember that ‘away’ is right here, in Earth’s water, Earth’s atmosphere and Earth’s land.
~ Nagini