Allow scrap collectors in landfill, say green experts

The BMC’s plan to ban scrap collectors from entering the Deonar dumping ground will affect the livelihood of more than 2,500 ragpickers, say experts.

With citizens not taking the responsibility of segregating waste, scrap collectors should be allowed to go to the dump and collect recyclable material, environmentalists said.

The BMC’s plan to ban scrap collectors from entering the Deonar dumping ground will affect the livelihood of more than 2,500 ragpickers, say experts.

“What they (ragpickers) do is very important for the city,” said Jyoti Mhapsekar, trustee, Stree Mukti Sanghatana. “If their jobs are being taken away, they should be compensated with jobs elsewhere.”

“After the area being declared a prohibited zone, they were not given access to the waste they had collected,” said Nisha Bandekar, coordinator, Parisar Bhagini Vikas Sangha, an NGO that trains ragpickers to collect and segregate waste.

Ragpickers earn Rs500 a day and are generally divided into groups to collect unsegregated toxic waste coming to the dumping ground. They segregate the valuable dry waste from it and sell it.

Bibijan Amar Shaikh, a scrap collector, said, “We were first attacked by the slum mafia. Now, we are being asked to leave for no fault of ours. Why are we being blamed for the fires? People don’t give us jobs elsewhere too.”Only 5% of the waste from housing complexes in Mumbai is segregated at source and less than 2% of the organic waste is composted, according to the data from Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC)’s solid waste management (SWM) department.

Only 14,000 of an approximate 2,65,000 housing societies, buildings and gated complexes in the city segregate their waste. If citizens segregate their garbage, the recyclable material can be kept aside, the compostable waste can be turned into garden fertilizer.