Article: Observations from India's Waste Crisis

After generous contributions from friends online and offline, I finished editing the report "Observations from India's Crisis". The report is now available in two versions.

You can find the report here:

1) On Times of India here (updated March 9, 2013)

I thanks Mrs. Sudha Nambuduri for providing a chance to disseminate this report to a larger audience by publishing an excerpt of it in the English Daily with the largest circulation.

2) On WTERT's Blog here (updated March 9, 2013)

Thanks to Professor Nickolas Themelis and the Global WTERT Council for allowing me to publish the report in the form of a blog post, which will make it more easily searchable on google.

3) On Clean India Journal here (updated Jan 24, 2013)

I thank the Managing Editor Mohana for the interest in the issues covered in the report and for offering to publish it in their latest venture Waste Recycling India magazine too.

4) On Paneuro - Energy & Environment Magazine here
Username: paneuro
Password: z713xdr
Page: 65

I thank the Magazine Editor Paul Patane for featuring my article alongside articles by Danish Minister for Climate, European Commissioners for Climate Control, Energy and Environment, and other brilliant minds.

5) On D-Waste's website here

I thank D-Waste's CEO Antonis Mavropoulos and Maria Tsakona for being the first people to recognize the potential of the report.

6) At BioEnergy Consult's website, published as three articles here

I thank Salman Zafar and Arafat Aden for their encouragement.

The full list of Acknowledgements and Bibliography of the report will be published on www.wtert.org

Thank you all again for your interest and time.
Ranjith Annepu

Discussion on Waste Management Options in India

A request for help I posted on a LinkedIn group led to a lively discussion between waste management experts on waste management options for India. Read more about the discussion here. http://wtert.blogspot.com/2012/12/discussion-on-solutions-to-waste.html .

The request for help was for a new report I am about to publish, called "Observations from India's Crisis". It will be published in a PDF format on wtert.org and as a BLOG POST on blog.wtert.org.

An Analogy from the above discussion on LinkedIn, which is worth mentioning:

Professor Nickolas Themelis on Waste Management Options (He was the Adviser for my research on Sustainable Solid Waste Management in India that resulted in this blog) :

The situation with waste management is somewhat like that with public health: Good diet and exercise, vitamins, preventive medicine, all contribute to better health and less sickness. Despite all that, there will be some sick people who need to go to hospitals. It is obvious that advocating against hospitals or opposing new ones will not improve public health. 

It is the same situation with urban waste management: There all kinds of means for reduction, recycling, composting but ALL human experience has shown that at the end there remains a substantial fraction that has to go to either "incinerators with energy recovery or to sanitary landfills. Environmental organizations who oppose these two means on principle, in effect are perpetuating traditional landfilling. Regrettably, the Sierra Club is spending a lot of donated money doing just that.

Link to the entire discussion is here.
Link to the original article is here.

Integrated Solid Waste Management - Definition

Definition of Integrated Solid Waste Management

Integrated waste management is the coordinated use of a strategically chosen set of waste management options each of which play specific roles in prevention and reduction of waste and its transportation, and in material and energy recovery from wastes towards achieving maximum resource efficiency.

This definition is a result of combining two earlier definitions from

1. Coordinated use of a set of waste management methods, each of which can play a role in an overall Municipal Solid Waste Management plan. (The Global Development Research Center - GDRC)
2. Integrated solid waste management refers to the strategic approach to sustainable management of solid wastes covering all sources and all aspects, covering generation, segregation, transfer, sorting, treatment, recovery and disposal in an integrated manner, with an emphasis on maximizing resource use efficiency. (Mushtaq Ahmed Memon - International Environmental Technology Centre - IETC, United Nations Environment Programme - UNEP)

Future reference: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/definition