Mumbai rag picker talks on zero waste at UN climate change conference

Mumbai: As the world looks for a zero waste solution, waste pickers from Mumbai are gaining a new respect and are proud of contributing to real environmental sustainability, says Sushila Sable, a waste picker who has been attending the UN climate change conferences for the last four years.

Not only has she been participating in these meetings — at Copenhagen in 2009, Tianjin, China, 2010, Durban, South Africa, 2010 and last month’s meet in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil — but as a member of the Alliance of Indian Wastepickers, she has also spoken to delegates on the story of road to zero waste in this city.

Here the poorest of poor women pick and segregate dry and wet garbage — thus providing enough material for recycling factories as well as biogas plants that provide electricity, gas for civic body’s hospital kitchens and educational institutes and manure for gardens.

“In fact, during the recent power failure in Mumbai, lights in Shatabdi Hospital were lit by electricity from its biogas plant,” Sable told Gulf News.

Speaking to this paper at the Stree Mukti Sanghatana (SMS) centre, that has been helping women get liberation from social, economic and every kind of oppression, she said, “Thanks to this organisation, waste pickers have now realised that they play a significant role in reducing pollution in Mumbai and at the same time contribute to creating value.”

At Rio where she addressed rag pickers from Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Peru at the Global Alliance of Waste Pickers conference, she was surprised to learn that these countries used incinerators to destroy waste. Biogas plants evoked a lot of interest and many wanted to visit India to see how they worked, she added.

Though only around 30 per cent of Mumbai’s waste is segregated and recycled, Sable says, “We have a long way to go towards zero waste. From what I understood at these conferences, the rich nations complained that the poorer ones were causing environmental damage and here in Mumbai, it is once again the rich versus the poor — since the garbage from well-to-do areas of Colaba, Malabar Hill and other places are brought to dumping grounds of Deonar and now Kanjurmarg where poor slum-dwellers live.

“We need a strong political will to set this right,” she says.

The UN meet stressed that zero waste is an achievable goal and delegates have described burning and burying garbage as “primitive technology.” Jyoti Mhapsekar, President of SMS, too, says, “Our focus is on segregation which gives livelihood to many people. We believe biogas is the solution since it is a good clean fuel. Biogas plants developed by Indian scientists are much better than others.”

Sable advised waste pickers of Latin American countries to get united first and then exert their demands as waste pickers have done here.

Like the rest of Mumbai’s 15,000 waste pickers often seen poking around piled up garbage on the streets or in landfills, Sable thought it was a degrading job—having immersed into it for over 25 years after her family fled from a famine-stricken village in Jalna district when she was a child. Eleven years back, the SMS through training changed her outlook. Sable now heads a separate organisation to help waste pickers save money, get the right price for recyclable waste, promote health awareness and of course, create a Zero Waste situation in Mumbai.