GARBAGE BINS AND THE KYOTO PROTOCOL 

Indiranagar is one of Bangalore’s in-demand neighbourhoods. About ten years ago, a community leader there began an initiative for door-to-door collection of garbage. Soon, this effort mushroomed to cover over 1,000 households in the area.

At this point, it was felt that this localised initiative could be expanded and linked with the city’s own solid waste management system, and a dialogue with the city corporation was initiated. Over the following two years, the city made and broke several promises to this community, gradually destroying the local initiative.

This story is not uncommon: across the country, hundreds of local initiatives that initially emerge beneath the city’s radar screen face similar fates – either a complete asphyxiation of community leadership, or a breathless sense of patronage-based survival dependent on an occasional enlightened officer or politician. 

There are many dimensions to the municipal solid waste (msw) issue – opportunities for local-level community engagement; substantial differences in the quality of waste services across the rich-poor divide; urban externalities (given that the waste is often removed to the surrounding villages); regional planning issues (given that no village wants to have a landfill site in its jurisdiction); environmental degradation driven by poor waste handling; and economics –the cost of managing msw.

And it is economics –in a distorted sense - that is driving the direction of our response currently: Bangalore generates over 2,000 tonnes of garbage every day. Given that the city spends over Rs 75 crores every year on msw, there is a well-established nexus of vested interest to thwart any change in the status quo.  

The numbers are staggering: across the country, we generate over 50 million tons of msw - Rs 5000 crores every year in dealing inefficiently with our msw. According to toxicslink, an NGO involved in addressing environmental issues, this is estimated to rise five-fold over the next five decades under a business-as-usual scenario. The problem has reached a state where the Supreme Court directed every concerned authority responsible for municipal solid wastes to implement prescribed standards by December 31, 2003, with minimal compliance so far.  

The environmental consequences are substantial: a national strategy study of assessing the issues surrounding greenhouse gases led by the Ministry of Environment and TERI (www.teriin.org/nss) showed that msw emissions account for 2.5% of the total emissions in the country.  

Given the poor financial state of our municipalities, and the competing claims for scarce resources, we need to solve the twin problems of funding and environmental degradation simultaneously. And this is where the silver lining could be: the possible access to funding through the emerging carbon trading eco-system that is being put in place as part of the Kyoto protocol.  

A quick and necessary background, unfortunately stuffed with acronyms: The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – UNFCCC - was agreed to in Rio de Janeiro, 1992. This agreement aims at the stabilisation of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere, at a level that would prevent dangerous changes to the climate.

Based on this, the Kyoto Protocol then set binding commitments by 39 developed countries and economies in transition to reduce their GHG emissions by an average of 5.2 per cent on 1990 levels (the first commitment period, 2008 - 2012).

One of the three ways to reduce emissions is through what is called the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). A CDM project provides certified emissions reductions (CERs) to developed countries, which they can use to meet their GHG reduction commitments under the Kyoto Protocol.  

This has led to a small but growing demand for carbon credits, which developing countries could supply. While the US stance on the Kyoto protocol has placed the carbon credits market in some jeopardy, trading has already begun, with prices ranging around $4 per CER. The entire process of identifying projects for CER credits is in its infancy, with barely a few hundred projects listed on the global CDM website (www.cdm.unfccc.int).  

The national study referred to earlier was done to estimate the potential of CDM for India across many fields, including msw. The study highlights 5 projects that were short-listed for CDM development, including one in msw.

While the sectoral focus of CDM is on energy - and rightfully so given its size and contribution to emissions - an analysis of the 5 projects is quite revealing: the municipal solid waste project has the largest potential emission reduction – 92,200 CERs, more than the all the other projects put together. It also has the lowest transaction cost of monitoring and implementation, around 1% of the potential CER income. Given projected CER pricing, the msw project is expected to result in CER income around $400,000 every year, or about Rs 2 crores p.a. for a 150-ton-per-day msw plant.

This seems trivial, but pause a bit and extrapolate the figures. For a city like Bangalore, this could mean Rs 30 crores - 50% of its msw expenses - of CER-driven income by adopting alternative models of msw management, which are also environmentally sound. Across the country, the number is Rs 2,000 crores every year, not a small chunk of change for cash-strapped municipalities. 

This is all new stuff, only just beginning like a winter’s dawn, and emerging over the next five years. India has the opportunity to capture a reasonable share of the CDM market in a variety of sectors, ranging from energy to industrial processes. Municipal solid waste could possibly be a sleeper sector.

 All this is theoretical, and definitely won’t happen by the inertia of some natural process. Capitalising on the CDM opportunities to solve our urban solid waste problems will need leadership at many levels, from national CDM policy-makers to municipal representatives and administrators. Importantly, it will mean establishing the connective tissue across these stakeholders so that a domino effect of quick wins is nurtured. Hopefully, somewhere in this complex chain, there will be a recognition and revival of local community efforts like the one in Indiranagar.

The author is founder of Janaagraha. He can be reached at ramesh@janaagraha.org