Solid waste management: Technological assessment

Abstract

An important side-note to India’s tremendous growth over the last few decades has been the almost exponential increase in solid waste output of the country. As India has progressed to a more urbanized nation, industrial waste generation has shown a marked increase and has become an equally worrisome area. Given the relatively weak waste management processes currently existing in the country, further growth is only going to compound this problem. This necessitates the need for instituting and implementing well thought out and scalable waste management processes across the nation. To understand the problems and discuss over the potential solutions, we must carefully understand the different technologies that are available to us for management of solid wastes. An in-depth study of various solutions along with their benefits, resource requirements and associated challenges needs to be done in order to better define the scope of potential answers. Furthermore, there is also a need to look at the various processes followed by other nations, especially those who have been through similar development phases as ours and learn from their experiences. Similarly, since a majority of these processes are majorly dependent on the cultural as well as people practices of the countries, we must also assess such initiatives in India which have done well as well as those which haven’t in order to better identify scalable solutions which can be implemented in India to great success.