Mega Project: Sorting Trash for a better tomorrow
There’s a huge problem of waste management in Pakistan, this is an even bigger problem in Karachi, according to a 2016 study Karachi produces around 12,000 tons of solid waste on a daily basis, the problem with this is that there is no proper waste management system in place, yes there are governmental and private bodies that work on this, but it’s still not even nearly enough. Here are a few examples of a few pictures I took of the trash accumulated in the streets of my area:
Maybe what’s the most funny, or depressing part of the pictures is that these were all taking within 5-mins of walking distance from each other.
Waste can be extremely useful; for example, food waste can be used as fertilizer and can even be used to produce bio-gas, broken glasses can be given to glass industries which can reuse them in their glass making process and even plastics can be burned to produced energy through the process of pyrolysis. The major problem, from what my research is that there is no sorting of trash in our homes, we just clump all the solid waste together in one bag and throw it out, which eventually ends up in land fills, which contaminates the land and water, and is hazardous to human health, and with the growing rates of land, land fills will eventually become economically unfeasible. There’s a lot of potential for re-usability in our trash, we just have to find a way to implement this change.
Though I wasn’t sure who to get in contact with to help better understand this problem and find a practical solution for it, I did come across Waste Busters through one of their programs “Clean Pakistan”; Waste busters is a private company which recycles garbage collected from home to produce useful products such as composts, fertilizers, soil conditioner and even furniture produced from plastic.
This gave me idea on how we can essential start a experimental project, we would target 5 or 6 families and ask them to sort their trash for the period of 4 to 5 weeks, we’d collect the trash every 2 or 3 days, safely dispose the ones that can’t be used and auction the remainder to industries which can repurpose them into useful products. The revenue generated could then be used to payback the family which would increase their motivation to keep sorting their trashes, and we can observe what else can motivates them and what they find tedious to do. And build a step-by-step guide on how to slowly integrate this plan into more and more houses, expanding from a couple of houses, to towns, to cities and then to the country.
