(TOI)
Alappuzha in Kerala is a “waste smart” city according to recent assessment by a Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) team. Reason? It has managed to achieve 100% waste segregation in 12 of the city’s 23 wards. It doesn’t landfill, instead a majority of the households have biogas plants and composting systems. But as per the Centre’s recent Swachch Survekshan survey 2017, Alappuzha ranks at 380. The top three “cleanest” cities according to the Swachch survey—Indore, Bhopal and Visakhapatnam, have a centralized system of waste management.
While these do have door-to-door waste collection and efficient transportation of waste, CSE points out that all three cities do not segregate waste at source and finally resort to landfilling. Very little waste is processed at source. The best practice in contrast, the world over is to segregate, recycle and process waste at source in a decentralized manner and minimize dumping. In fact, The MSW Rules, 2016 clearly state that waste needs to be segregated into three categories at the household level – wet, dry and domestic hazardous waste. Then, are the cleanest cities as per the Centre’s survey really clean?
