Abstract

Bangalore is among five largest cities of India producing about 3600 tons per day of municipal solid waste (MSW).  MSW in Bangalore usually has a high percentage of fermentable organic components that degrade easily in nature.  Presently, Bangalore employs a quasi-centralized collection system followed by an open-to-sky processing and land filling.  A significant fraction also undergoes open dumping. Collection and transportation systems are today quite satisfactory; that does not allow anaesthetic accumulation of wastes in residential area or street corners.  The informal sector for recycling is also quite active in collecting the recyclables from houses, open bins (wherever present), other collection /transportation systems as well as from dumping and processing sites.  A few of the recyclers purchase recyclables from individual household, as is done in several parts of the country.  The paper describes the potential for residential locality based recycling and processing systems involving total recovery and recycling of the recyclables and conversion of organic fermentables to biogas.  In the past, a large number of such units have functioned achieving various levels of success – however none of them reported to be commercially viable.  Most of such efforts did not sustain long periods and were often abandoned midway due to political and /or economic issues.  In this paper we describe a locality based system and use its field data to show that commercially run processing systems can become viable.  In order for this to happen, it is firstly necessary to achieve a high degree of non-organic waste recycling and in place of composting, the fermentable wastes are transformed to locally used biogas – this combination can alone be sustainable in today’s state of art in this area.

Keywords: Bangalore, Municipal solid waste, sustainability, decentralized processing.