OVERVIEW

In India, the majority of the people do not take steps to manage their waste properly. That might not be the problem for a household but it’s a problem for a garbage collector. After collecting the waste, Garbage collector segregates it by going into the sewers, threatening their own lives. Not only that, the improper disposal of waste leads various kinds of pollution and climate change. The situation is very alarming and people have to understand the importance of waste segregation.
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If there's one thing we can easily do to fight the mountains of garbage, it's by segregating our wet and dry waste at our home.  Our proposed approach, "Wayste" is focused on forming a loop of waste generation and waste as a valuable commodity by gamifying the process of segregation at its initial stage of generation.

DISCOVERING & RESEARCH

Mapping the current waste
management journey

Yowling nonstop the whole night eat grass, throw it back up. Cats woo taco cat backwards spells taco cat but chase red laser dot  put toy mouse in food bowl run out of litter box at full speed so the cat was chasing the mouse. Groom forever, stretch tongue and leave it slightly out, blep. My cat stared at me he was sipping his tea, too. Try to jump onto window and fall while scratching at wall purr for destroy house in 5 seconds  has closed eyes but still sees you and enslave the hooman  poop on the floor, break a planter, sprint, eat own hair, vomit hair, hiss, chirp at birds, eat a squirrel, hide from fireworks, lick toe beans, attack christmas tree.

CONVERSATIONAL RESEARCH

Scaling Down to the Neighbourhood

# COVID IMPACT

Lately, I happened to meet a friend of my father at the supermarket. He shares the unfortunate news of his wife being tested positive for COVID-19. That's when I saw that he was disposing of his wife's biomedical waste with the general domestic waste - without any segregation.

"Do you know the possible repercussions of this act? Are you aware of the risks it poses to the safai karmachari, who would be responsible for collecting this garbage?" I asked my uncle. "Do you understand that if someone comes in contact with this particular garbage or even that sanitation worker, they would also be at high risk of catching the virus?" Then he just abruptly ended the conversation by asking, "Okay, so what is the correct way of disposal then?"

There’s another rising issue which isn't just about waste generating from healthcare centres. The disease is constantly being spreading beyond hospitals. Most of the patients who have minor symptoms are isolating and recovering at home. While the asymptomatic really don't know that the trash they're throwing could be contaminated! In other words, virus-loaded trash has been generating regularly and is untraceable as is mixed with the municipality waste.

The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoH&FW) is anticipating that an excessive amount of waste is being generated as a repercussion of all the measures we have adopted during the epidemic. The govt. of India and all the ministries have also been doing tremendous work to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. With all-new guidelines, rules & regulations, they have done everything to prescribe the proper disposable of PPEs and Bio-Medical Waste.

Q. So where is all this mixed waste going?

“On the face of it, India seems well equipped to handle this extra load of biomedical waste with a nation incineration capacity of 800 tonnes a day. But experts said other factors needed to be taken into account." - Trisha Mukherjee@science.thewire.in

These incinerators are built to treat medical waste, so it demands the inputs to be already segregated. That comes down to the question of how we segregate waste (or actually, not)? Households have been practising a really low level of segregation with the increased use of plastic waste.

From our research, we got to know that most of the residents aren't even aware of these guidelines. So when I asked about using "yellow bags" to pack their hazardous waste, I got attacked by a question asking, "where can we get these yellow bags?" To be honest, even I didn't really know the shop where I can buy one in my locality. After some neighbourhood meetings, we all concluded the prime reason for this problem. We found out that those government guidelines have not been passed efficiently to the ground level to our knowledge.

And even the implementation of these rules & regulations is a major setback. The truck showing up every morning to collect our waste is directed by two men - one of them is driving and the other one doesn't care if we are discharging mixed waste. However, as a waste generator, my neighbours do not consider this as a problem or their duty. But their incompetency to give feedback about this issue to the respected corporation is a major pain point.

Q. How big is the problem of single-use masks in comparison to plastic bottles & bags? Why do masks have to be plastic?

The general population, who just need to wear a mask to protect others 'like they are meeting somebody and they don't know whether they are infected or not and they have to protect the other person they are with' - for that, they don't need to wear a plastic mask. A plastic mask is designed for surgery or a hospital environment. So rather a reusable mask (maybe cotton) but not plastic is a better idea!