What about waste in the Auroville area?

In 2014, the newly elected government of Shri Narendra Modi made a call to clean the country and initiated the “Swachh Bharat” [“Clean India” in Hindi] programme. The move was welcomed by all, as all over the country the mountains of garbage are becoming unmanageable.

New Delhi itself is repeatedly engulfed by toxic smoke from spontaneous burning landfills surrounding the city, and so are other cities and towns in India. For some years, Auroville too experienced pollution from the Pondicherry landfill [see AVToday # 273 March 2012], a problem that was only resolved when the landfill was closed.

These days, it is garbage along the roads and on the fields which threatens the villagers’ and our well being. In the early days, waste was essentially organic and non toxic and could be used in many constructive ways. Today, garbage contains materials such as plastics and aluminum which are potentially toxic, polluting and, when incinerated, harmful to health.

A bit of history

The City of the Future cannot be clean and healthy without evolving clean and healthy surroundings. A polluted bioregion will affect the villagers’ and Auroville’s water, air and soil qualities.

Over the past 30 years, various attempts have been made to introduce solid waste management systems in the villages, but they were not sustainable. Five years ago, the Bommayarpalayam village Panchayat and the Regional Planning Department of Auroville’s Town Development Council (TDC) attempted to jointly develop a Solid Waste Management programme for the surrounding villages. Financed by the Panchayat, a three months pilot project of a house-to-house collection system was started in Kuilapalayam. The TDC Regional Planning provided technical support. Simultaneously, village cleanups were organized regularly.

Out of this KUILAI CLEAN Service was born. On a daily basis, waste collection and segregation are happening. For a monthly fee, the waste of all the shops, restaurants, and banks along the main streets is collected. The income from the sale of recyclables and the fee collected makes the unit financially viable.

However, a problem developed with the non-recyclables as there is no land available for a landfill site. KUILAI CLEAN is collaborating with the local administration to solve this. But a site which had been identified earlier, and where a beginning of a landfill was made, was closed when it was discovered that the landfill leakage could contaminate a nearby well. The dumped garbage was removed, and is now temporarily parked on Auroville land (without permission). A new site is yet to be identified.

To effectively introduce solid waste management for the villages, a new direction is necessary. Auroville’s Waste Without Borders, a project of Palmyra, is taking the lead. It has formulated an integrated solid waste management plan for the bioregion, an ambitious programme to manifest a centralized regional waste collection system for all the surrounding villages.

A state-of-the-art solid waste management facility is planned in the neighborhood of Edayanachavady. Waste will be collected from house to house by waste collectors and transported to this facility, where it will be segregated, recycled, sold or land-filled. At the same time, the project aims at introducing innovative solutions to reduce waste and spread awareness about composting, recycling and upcycling. The facility aims to become a self-supporting and sustainable enterprise and a model for other places in India.

The project is in line with the recommendations of India’s National Green Tribunal, which in 2015 recommended the setting up of centralized regional waste collection facilities instead of small scale individual systems. However, such centralized facilities require a proper site, a waste processing plant and disposal facilities for non-recyclables.

The project is now under consideration by the local administration and has been introduced to the village Panchayat secretaries and the Women’s Federation leaders. All have expressed great interest. The local administration has been requested to make a large plot of land available, and efforts have started to raise the Rs 1.3 crores (US $ 190,000) required for building the facilities and the Rs 27 lakhs (US $ 40,000) running expenses of its first year.