#11: India’s Waste Crisis - Why 80% of Trash Goes Unprocessed in India?
India’s waste management crisis is staggering: the country generates roughly 65 million tonnes of trash each year, yet about 80% of it is neither recycled nor treated.
India’s waste management crisis is staggering: the country generates roughly 65 million tonnes of trash each year, yet about 80% of it is neither recycled nor treated.
Only a quarter of India’s collected municipal waste is processed, with the rest dumped in sprawling landfills or strewn in open dumps.
The waste stream itself is huge and diverse – about 45-50% is organic matter, 20-25% recyclable (paper, plastic, glass, etc.), and 30-35% inert debris – but lack of source segregation means even compostable and recyclable components end up mixed and lost.
India produces some 5.6 million tonnes of plastic waste and 1.5 million tonnes of e-waste annually, yet much of this is not sustainably managed; for instance, over three-quarters of e-waste is not collected or recycled through formal channels.
The recycling rate hovers around 20-25%, abysmally low by global standards. In contrast, countries like Germany recycle up to 68% of their municipal waste - that highlights how far behind India remains.
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Dumping the Problem: India’s Waste Dilemma
This chronic situation persists despite a series of policy interventions and reforms over the years.
The Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) launched in 2014 put national focus on sanitation and solid waste management, and the government updated the Solid Waste Management Rules in 2016 (the first overhaul since 2000) to mandate source segregation, composting, recycling, and scientific landfilling while discouraging open dumping.
Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) was introduced under the Plastic Waste Management Rules, making companies responsible for collecting and processing the plastic packaging they put into the market.
In theory, these policies should have transformed waste handling: officials claim that 96% of urban wards now have door-to-door garbage collection, and 88% boast 100% waste segregation at the source. On paper, India is even “on track” to achieve 100% solid waste management soon.
However, these rosy statistics and proclamations are wildly at odds with ground reality. In practice, most cities and towns still fail to ensure even basic segregation and safe disposal.
Urban local bodies (ULBs) – primarily responsible for managing municipal waste – are plagued by systemic inefficiencies, capacity gaps, and a lack of accountability.
They typically spend 60-70% of their meagre waste budgets on street sweeping, 20-30% on collection and transport, and <5% on treatment or disposal.
This skewed spending results in little investment in composting, recycling, or sanitary landfills.
The collection itself is uneven: while metros manage to collect 70-90% of waste, many smaller cities collect less than 50% – the rest is simply littered or burned by residents.
Segregation of waste at source remains the rare exception rather than the norm, despite the 2016 rules.
In most places, household garbage of all types still gets dumped into the same bin or bag, and even well-intentioned citizens who sort their waste often see it mixed together by the time it’s hauled away.
This failure of segregation cascades through the system, undermining recycling and composting efforts (since dirty, mixed waste is hard to recycle) and overloading landfills with material that shouldn’t be there.
Waste-to-energy (WtE) incineration plants, often touted as a techno-fix to reduce landfill volumes, have largely flopped in India.
The country has built a handful of WtE plants – 14 in total over the years – but half of them have shut down due to operational failures. As of 2021, only 11 WtE plants were operational across all of India, a minuscule number given the thousands of cities and towns.
The reasons are telling:
Indian municipal waste has high wet organic content and high inert content (soil, dust), giving it a low calorific value that makes it unsuitable for efficient burning.
Many plants struggle to stay viable without adding fuel; the power they produce costs far more than electricity from coal or solar.
Frequent breakdowns, high operating costs, and toxic emissions have plagued projects from Delhi to Bengaluru, and local residents often oppose WtE facilities over pollution concerns.
Composting and biomethanation (for biogas) have seen some adoption – all states have at least some composting facilities on paper – but here too, success is patchy.
Many compost plants suffer from poor quality input (due to mixed waste) and produce low-grade compost with limited market demand; several have shut or operate under capacity.
Informal sector recyclers (the millions of ragpickers and scrap dealers who salvage materials) remain the unsung backbone preventing a total collapse: by some estimates, thanks to these informal workers, a majority of India’s recyclable dry waste (especially plastics and metals) does get intercepted and recycled at some stage.
They are the reason India’s recycling rate isn’t even lower – women and children picking through trash piles, retrieving plastic bottles, cardboard, metal scrap to sell.
But the informal sector can only do so much.
They cherry-pick high-value recyclables; low-value plastics (multilayer sachets, thin films) and soiled materials are left behind. And their work comes at great human cost – informal waste pickers work with zero protection, exposed daily to filth and toxins, and earn a pittance.
Meanwhile, most citizens and businesses have yet to fundamentally change their behaviour around waste.
Consumer culture is generating more single-use packaging and disposables than ever, but public awareness and participation in waste reduction and segregation remains limited.
Rules against littering or dumping are rarely enforced; it’s common to see residents, construction crews, and street vendors dumping garbage in the open.
Extended Producer Responsibility for companies exists on paper, but until recently enforcement was lax – many companies simply ignored their take-back obligations or filed perfunctory reports. (The government has now tightened EPR reporting and even threatened penalties, but it’s still early, and actual compliance is murky.)
Plastic waste illustrates this dynamic: India nominally banned 19 single-use plastic items in 2022 (like flimsy bags, straws, cutlery) and has EPR targets for plastic packaging – yet plastic bags and wrappers remain ubiquitous on streets and in landfills, and brand owners have not been fully held to account for the waste their products create.
The private sector’s role in waste management has been a mixed bag.
Some cities have privatised collection or contracted companies to build treatment plants, with varying results – in a few cases it improved efficiency, in others it led to cost overruns or neglect of poorer areas.
Innovative startups and NGOs are piloting solutions (from app-based recycling pickups to turning waste into building materials), and industry associations talk up “circular economy” initiatives.
But at the national scale, corporate efforts remain insufficient to counter the sheer volume of waste generated.
Pockets of Progress, Mountains of Waste
That said, pockets of progress shine a light on what is possible.
Indore, a city in Madhya Pradesh, has become India’s poster child for effective waste management, winning the “cleanest city” title six years running.
Through strong political will and civic participation, Indore’s municipal corporation achieved 100% door-to-door collection and segregation of waste into six categories (wet, plastic, electronic, etc.), composts or bio-methanizes all its organic waste, and recycles most of the rest – such that very little waste now goes to landfill.
The city even mined and remediated its old dumps, freeing up land.
This shows that with the right model (and adequate funding), Indian cities can drastically reduce dumping.
Other positive examples include Bengaluru’s ward-level composting, Pune’s integration of waste picker cooperatives into the formal system, and Kerala’s push for decentralised waste management (and recently approving its first WtE plant).
The central government, under SBM Urban 2.0, is now focusing on “garbage-free cities” and clearing legacy dumpsites.
Nearly 2,500 old landfill sites blighting cities are slated for bioremediation by 2026, and some progress is underway: about 41% of the 2.2 billion tonnes of accumulated legacy waste across India’s dumps has reportedly been treated so far.
In Delhi, for instance, authorities have begun biomining the towering garbage mounds at Ghazipur, Bhalswa, and Okhla landfills.
Dozens of cities have started zero-waste campaigns, distributing home composters and setting up material recovery facilities for recyclables.
Plastic waste processing has also inched upward, with the government claiming over 70% of plastic packaging waste was “recycled or co-processed” in 2022-23 under new EPR filings (though independent verification is lacking).
These actions are steps in the right direction, but they remain woefully inadequate compared to the scale of the problem.
Pilots and isolated successes have yet to translate into country-wide impact.
Indore’s model has not been fully replicated in metros like Delhi or Mumbai, which still struggle with garbage choking their drains and gigantic landfill fires.
Three years into SBM 2.0, half of India’s big-city landfills haven’t even begun remediation and only 38% of dumped waste in metros has been cleared– meaning the majority of legacy garbage is still sitting there, leaching toxins.
And as waste generation continues to rise rapidly with urbanisation and consumption, even new facilities can’t keep up.
India’s total waste volume is projected to skyrocket to 165 million tonnes by 2030 and 436 million tonnes by 2050. In other words, the worst may be yet to come if fundamental changes aren’t made.
The consequences of the status quo are dire and multi-faceted.
Environmentally, the dominance of open dumping and landfilling means high pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.
Decomposing organic waste in dumps produces methane, a potent heat-trapping gas; India’s landfills are one of the country’s biggest sources of methane emissions, exacerbating climate change.
Water and soil contamination is a silent crisis: toxic leachate from unlined dumpsites seeps into groundwater and rivers, laden with heavy metals and carcinogens. Many urban lakes and streams have effectively become sewage and garbage slurry, killing biodiversity.
Plastic waste discarded into streets and drains often finds its way to rivers and ultimately the ocean – India is a major contributor to marine plastic pollution, with the Ganga and Yamuna among the world’s top plastic-carrying rivers.
The health impact on humans is catastrophic.
Millions live in the shadow of towering garbage mountains; for example, the Ghazipur landfill in Delhi has grown over 65 metres high (nearly the height of Qutub Minar), and periodically erupts in flames, blanketing nearby neighbourhoods in toxic smoke.
In April 2024, a fire at Ghazipur raged for days, spewing dioxin-laden fumes – a grimly common occurrence. Those living near such sites or working as waste pickers suffer severe health problems: studies show high rates of tuberculosis, respiratory illnesses like asthma, gastrointestinal diseases, and even cancers in communities adjacent to dumps.
The conditions literally shorten lives – in one Mumbai slum by the Deonar landfill, the average life expectancy is just 39 years . Children growing up in these areas are chronically exposed to polluted air and water, leading to stunted development and disease.
There are also acute tragedies: garbage landslides have occurred (in 2017, a portion of Ghazipur landfill collapsed, killing people), and waste workers occasionally die in fires or under trash piles.
Economically, the country bears hidden costs: poorly managed waste drains municipal finances (cities spend huge sums just moving garbage around), harms productivity (through health burdens and lost work days from illness), and squanders potential resources.
One analysis noted that India’s annual e-waste contains over $6 billion worth of recoverable metals like gold, copper and nickel, value that is literally being thrown away due to inadequate recycling.
The informal recycling sector recovers some of this value, but at the cost of workers’ health and without tax revenue.
Furthermore, the scarcity of land is an economic issue – cities are running out of space for new landfills, and existing dumps occupy thousands of acres of what could be productive land (Mumbai’s main dump is 300 acres in prime city real estate).
Tourism and quality of urban life also suffer: overflowing garbage bins and littered public places deter visitors and investors, while residents cope with foul odors and pest infestations (dengue and cholera outbreaks have been linked to uncollected garbage attracting mosquitoes and flies).
In rural areas, unmanaged waste (often burned openly) adds to air pollution and can poison livestock and wildlife that ingest plastics.
Why India Needs a War-Footing Response
In sum, the claim that “80% of India’s 65 million tonnes of trash is not recycled” is unfortunately accurate – and it underpins a broader indictment of India’s waste management system.
Despite ample policies and lofty goals, implementation has fallen woefully short. Systemic failures by urban authorities, a lack of public participation, and weak enforcement of rules have created an unsustainable and dangerous situation.
The progress made – model cities like Indore, new waste facilities, stricter rules – is real but piecemeal, overwhelmed by the magnitude of the waste deluge.
Without dramatic improvements – from segregating waste at the source in every home, to building sufficient composting, recycling, and sanitary landfill capacity, to holding manufacturers accountable for the waste their products generate – India risks drowning in its own garbage.
The need for action is urgent and stark: to protect public health, the environment, and the country’s economic future, India must treat its waste crisis as an emergency, enforcing its laws and investing in infrastructure on a war footing, before the mountains of trash grow any higher.
The time for incremental pilot projects is past; what’s needed now is a comprehensive overhaul and a collective societal commitment to reducing, segregating, and responsibly managing waste, so that the nation can finally clean up the mess it has been piling up for decades.
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Best,
Jayant Mundhra
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