Suhas Dixit

On average, each one of us produces 4.4 pounds of solid waste each day. This adds up to almost a ton of trash per person, per year. Every year, each American throws out about 1,200 pounds of organic garbage that can be composted. About one-third of an average dump is made up of packaging material! The highest point in Hamilton County, Ohio (near Cincinnati) is "Mount Rumpke." It is actually a mountain of trash at the Rumpke sanitary landfill towering 1045 ft. above sea level. The U.S. is the #1 trash-producing country in the world at 1,609 pounds per person per year. This means that 5% of the world's people generate 40% of the world's waste. A modern glass bottle would take 4000 years or more to decompose -- and even longer if it's in the landfill. Americans use 2,500,000 plastic bottles every hour! Most of them are thrown away! Americans use 85,000,000 tons of paper a year; about 680 pounds per person. If all our newspaper was rec...

Waste management  or  Waste disposal  is all the activities and actions required to manage waste from its inception to its final disposal.This includes among other things, collection, transport, treatment and disposal of waste together with monitoring and regulation. It also encompasses the legal and regulatory framework that relates to waste management encompassing guidance on recycling etc. Plastic Waste The term normally relates to all kinds of waste, whether generated during the extraction of raw materials, the processing of raw materials into intermediate and final products, the consumption of final products, or other human activities, including municipal (residential, institutional, commercial), agricultural, and social (health care, household hazardous waste, sewage sludge). Waste management is intended to reduce adverse effects of waste on health, the environment. The life-cycle begins with design, then proceeds throug...

Electronic waste, or e-waste, are electronic products that have become unwanted or non-working, and hence are thrown into waste. As technology advances at such a high rate, many electronic devices become “waste” after a few short years of use as the users upgrade their devices very quickly. In fact, whole categories of old electronic items contribute to e-waste when new ones are available in the market, such as telephones being replaced by mobiles players, and mobiles are replaced every 2 years as better models are launched. E-waste is waste created from anything electronic: computers, TVs, air conditioners, mobile phones, VCRs, CD players, fax machines, printers, etc. Electronic waste is rapidly filling the landfills of the globe. In the US, more than 100 million computers are discarded with less than 20% being recycled properly. Whereas, India just recycles 4% of the e-waste. Globally, as much as 60 million metric tons enter landfills every year. These electronics contain som...

Waste disposal is a major global challenge of the 21st century. Recycling waste improves environmental sustainability by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases and strenghtens the economy by supplying packaging materials and raw materials. Waste pickers are the major players in collecting waste to the recycling industry. Large number of people from low-income communities make a living by collecting, sorting, and then selling reclaimed waste through middle-men to the recycling industry. Where others see trash or garbage, the waste pickers see resources. They are very good at sorting different types of waste by colour, weight, and end use for selling to the recycling industry. Yet they are hardly  recognized for the important role they are  playing in creating value from the waste generated by others and for their  contribution in reducing carbon emissions. Waste pickers in unhealthy environment Luckily, civic bodies all over the world have begun to promote the vir...

With growing population of the world, the amount of garbage that people produce too is increasing drastically. Our lifestyles require easily disposable products, like water bottles, food packets, but  use of these products has led to a huge amount of plastic pollution around the world. Plastic has the potential to cause huge harm to the environment in the form of air, water and land pollution. It negatively impacts the natural environment and creates hazards for plants, wildlife and even human population. It may even kill plant life and posing dangers to local animals. Plastic is a useful material, but it is also made from toxic compounds which cause illness, and is not biodegradable. Causes of Plastic Pollution The plastic causing the pollution can vary in size from big to microscopic. The major contributors to this problem today include: Trash Plastic is everywhere. Milk cartons, water bottles, food psckets . Every time one of these item is consumed. I...

1,27,486 tonnes of waste was generated daily in India in 2011-12 of which Mumbai alone accounted for 6.11 per cent. Every resident in the metropolis generates about 630 grams of waste daily, and it is expected to touch 1 kg in the coming years. A city that's striving for land. This leaves its planners with an extremely difficult choice — where to dump? The municipal corporations are responsible to dispose the wastes in a safe way. Even the developed nations face the issue of waste disposal but there is a major difference – developed nations are able to achieve high levels of source segregation and have also done much more scientific research on the various disposal techniques and have also implemented them through active public-private participation. Firstly, Indiafalls short when it comes to the space in the cities to dispose off the waste. Secondly, even after having a waste management policy, the current system don’t have the required technological capabilities and ther...