-Scroll.in The city urgently needs formalised, standardised spaces for waste work. September was the peak of monsoons in India. It rained incessantly. Women from the waste picker community in a slum in North Delhi’s Wazirabad were been in a fix. Their homes, which are also their workspaces, were inundated with water. Their husbands and many of the women themselves collect, sort and segregate waste. They are also involved in recycling and reselling it. The...

-Down to Earth Around 88% respondents want to switch to less-polluting alternatives but report they are not easily available Around 12.3 billion sanitary napkins, amounting to 113,000 tonnes of waste, reached India’s Landfills every year, according to a new study. Improper disposal and non-segregation from household waste leads to unhygienic working condition for waste workers, the report said. Commonly available sanitary napkins constitute 90 per cent plastic, the report claimed. India generates 3.3...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Make no mistake, our cumulative efforts to curb the menace of single-use plastic are just scratching the surface. And while carrybags have been the focus of much of the current discourse — simply because they are the most visible form of threat — a number of other single-use plastic items have remained under the radar. Among these are cigarette butts (yes! they are plastic), drinking...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: After years of existing as a repulsive mound of festering garbage, the landfill at Okhla has got a look that is more attractive. One face of the stabilised landfill has finally been “greened” and the capping work continues on the other sides. When the work is over, the overused landfill will get a new avatar as an ecopark. Tufail Ahmed, the engineer in charge of the...

-The Times of India CHANDIGARH: Waste dumped in landfill sites is contaminating surrounding groundwater in the Tricity, according to a PGI study published recently in an international journal. Scientists fear non-segregation and unregulated dumping of the garbage has deteriorated the quality with the passage of time, an alarming sign. Experts say that once the groundwater becomes polluted, contamination persists and becomes difficult to treat due to physical inaccessibility. Concentrations of heavy metal ions...