Help wanted: Experienced garbologists

Time of India

a day ago

R Edwin Sudhir, a Bengaluru-based journalist and writer, has the interesting privilege of living in a once-sleepy town which has morphed into a city fast-forwarding into a connected world but sadly disconnected with the ground realities of more people competing for shrinking space. The experience is oddly exhilarating yet often mildly alarming for long-time residents who see how technology has transformed a sleepy beantown into a bustling boomtown. And swept its residents too in the headlong rush to keep pace. LESS ... MORE
Bengaluru generates humongous tonnes of garbage every day. The city's civic body may give you an official figure but the actual figure could be higher, as it usually is with government data. A lot of it ends up on pavements and street corners and some piles up on overflowing vans parked by the roads. Much of it is carted away by smelly vehicles which do the rounds every morning. Men from them dart across to pick up (mostly) black, (often) biodegradable bags from bungalows or tip the contents of blue, plastic drums from apartments into their trucks.
Off they go to one landfill or the other on the outskirts of the city. This exercise is repeated every morning with some regularity, marred by festival days or flash strikes.
Some of this garbage is segregated and some is mixed.
That's why Greater Bengaluru Authority desperately needs garbologists. Its precursor, the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike, tried bravely to deal with the refuse but GBA needs men and women trained in garbology. Sadly, no university in India seems to offer this course and that's where the three Bengaluru universities can be pioneers. There are several models, like the University of Nevada Las Vegas. Our varsities can use the American models to design course content and customise material to local conditions. Students can intern with GBA and once they graduate, they can be absorbed into its solid waste department.
It's not rocket science, after all. Collect waste from residents, segregrate it and dispose it as per protocol. Waste-to-energy management is a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs willing to get their hands dirty. Anu Aga's Thermax Ltd in Pune has shown it's eminently possible.
Of course, residents need to do their bit, without leaving everything to the SWD. For starters, segregate waste, ensure black spots don't form, don't dump plastic water bottles and empty chips packets into drains, among others. Every bit helps.
To circle back a bit, garbologists are not only waste disposers. They analyse a city's waste to look for patterns of how it's generated and look for better ways to clear it. Bengaluru will be going to the root cause of the garbage problem and hopefully find solutions quickly. Lest we are forced to suffer an olfactory assault of rotting waste and suffer the ignominy of going from Garden City Garbage City in the span of just a few decades.
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Views expressed above are the author's own.