Bini Dahal

The other day, I came across a man with his big black car. He stops on an empty road, looks around and then retrieves a big white sack of garbage. And right in front of my eyes, I see him toss it to a heap of piled garbage. It felt like he had found a perfect place for garbage management. At that moment, my mind was saying: “Solid waste management is such a joke in the Kathmandu Metropolis!”

Keeping the house neat and clean is a priority for every household. After cleaning, we collect all the trash for the garbage collector to take it away. However, landfill sites these days have begun losing their capacity to hold such wastes. As reported by media, Sisdol located in Kakani Municipality of Nuwakot, is filled up completely and people living nearby the landfill site are suffering. Can this be even called management of waste?
And regarding the garbage collectors of our localities, it is ironic how we meet them more around the festive seasons than on weekdays. So when bags of garbage get piled up at houses, we take matters into our own hands. Our style of management is simple. Get out of the house early in the morning and throw it somewhere where there are few movements of people. This way not only the garbage gets disposed of, but no one will be there to say anything to us.

It’s not like we have no policy to manage the waste. The Solid Waste Management Act, 2011 is in place. But it just looks fancy on paper and nothing more. Our management abilities are in turmoil. We hardly have knowledge about biodegradables and non-biodegradables. We strictly believe that because we have paid a certain amount of money to the garbage collector, we should give away all the remnants of the kitchen and other waste without separating them properly.

The local government seems to have done nothing much to sensitise people on how they should be disposing of wastes. Though smart waste management technologies are the newest trend in the world, we have been unable to introduce and fully implement them.
Now coming back to the very incident, being an eyewitness to the man’s misdeed, I felt like a coward. I could have said something and maybe he would have taken the garbage back. Or maybe he would try to prove his point by showing how there are other people who were dumping garbage right there. An inability on the side of the local government to facilitate garbage collection and disposal has made it more difficult.

But at times, I believe we should stop having expectations from the government and the respective local authorities alone. Instead, we could make collaborative efforts from the side of the community. If only we begin making use of biodegradables and separating them from non-biodegradables, wastage coming from our houses can be reduced to half. Decreasing the consumption pattern of people could be a contributing change, but a difficult goal to achieve in light of the growing population. What will help is the conscious effort to ensure that less waste generation is the best way out.