From unchecked plastic pollution to unmanageable dumpsites, urgent steps are needed to protect fragile ecosystems and ensure a sustainable future for all
By Uzair Qadri
It is uncontestably the most common sight in the mornings in and around different localities, habitations, markets, etc., that shop owners, house owners of respective houses, etc., try to empty their backyards, front yards, the respective shop fronts, etc., of the refuse they produced the previous day.
In the process, they push the waste either to some side corner or disown it to a place where it no longer can be called theirs. The whole process of disowning is done consciously to give the impression that the producer is responsible, in being just a latent citizen. This waste either gets accumulated and added to by everyone until it becomes unmanageable, at which point hue and cry is raised for its closure and relocation to some far-from-the-eyes place.
It has been a fairly normal course, practised without much fuss, for decades now. It wasn’t much of an issue earlier, but because of the gargantuan nature of the mindlessness involved at every step—from its very origins, based on demand and catering to luxury, to its discarding—things deserve a bit of seriousness.
Because of the nasty rush towards a market economy, unnecessary shops, stores, godowns, etc., have come up for the sake of that elusive word called profit. The choices have increased pro rata. In the process, plastic has become an inextricable and inalienable part of our lives. From here, the status quo that follows then starts to have a problem of its own, with its destabilised journey. It cannot then remain detached from the reality of our society or somebody else’s problem. It then has to be owned by somebody.
Things have reached such a pass – absolutely normalised – that the standard of living of a particular family has to be measured or gauged by the amount of waste it produces. Go to the vicinity of any well-off businessman’s or salaried person’s, or some garment brand shop or well-known café and bistro in the mornings, and it has heaps of waste—non-biodegradable waste discarded, some of which is footballed by, or changed-behaviour dogs of the locality.
The waste taken to some removed-from-the-eyes place will, over time, break down into microplastics, create leachate, add to the woes of the receding water table of its host locality, and produce existentially vicious debilities—cancer being only a start. All of it isn’t transient but long-lasting, with the potential to impact generations through tinkering with DNA, damaging and fracturing chromosomes via terms like methylation, acetylation, clastogenesis, etc.
Everybody produces waste. After all, we are living organisms. We have a certain ecological footprint and a certain elbow room on that count. The planet Earth has supported life for 3.8 billion years. As Gandhi said, “The Earth has enough for everyone’s need, but not for everyone’s greed.” The planet won’t support—doesn’t have the capacity and resilience to support—the waste produced in the ugly factories, fat departmental stores, wasteful restaurants, over-tourism, etc.
For a place like Kashmir, with an extremely fragile ecology, all of these things are not just badly polluting but outlandish and annihilatory to their very core. There needs to be a clear-cut demarcation between luxury waste production and survival waste production.
These days, the importance attached to everything packaged is very high, but there are heaps of plastic—the complex polythenes, unnecessary envelopes, etc. All of the packaging is immediately discarded, adding to the piling dumpsite hill in that remote, removed-from-the-eyes place. There, they will produce leachate, over time expanding their radius of polluting groundwater, alongside harming aesthetics. Only because we have this conviction that once our waste is taken out, it doesn’t remain our waste; it ceases to be our waste.
Go anywhere nowadays, even outside smaller villages, closer to where some unfortunate family with limited means lives, and there is a smaller or larger dump site. Municipal services can’t cater to everything; they simply can’t. It’s not just about capacity or services; it’s also about the astronomical nature of waste produced.
According to government data, Jammu and Kashmir generated 30,342 tonnes of plastic waste in the financial year 2022-23. It is difficult to gauge the extent of the real problem because most of the waste released is unaccounted for. After plastic is discarded, we hardly ever know what actually goes into producing such packaging—plastic and all kinds of refuse, fractional distillates, chemicals—go into it. Since plastic has become such an essential part of our lives that we hardly think about replacing it, and even if we try, we will have to pay a prohibitive plastic premium.
The waste produced by departmental stores, relatively the new kids on the block, is put in the dustbin outside them without segregation, then taken by municipal authorities and dumped in a local dump site. For any such project, the DPR (Detailed Project Report) needs to incorporate ESG norms—environmental, social, and governance—into its value chain, from procurement to waste disposal. In the decorated and ornamented envelopes, this seems all hunky-dory to callous owners.
Devoid of ESG norms, any project—regardless of the point and line source of pollution—is a ticking time bomb. Even if they are largely unknown in practice, a clear, near-real, long-term trajectory of environmental impact, social impact, and laws in place needs to be outlined. Even for a nondescript service station, the action doesn’t have to be necessarily punitive. The local community should tell the owner that the project is unsustainable and is causing damage to their way of living, their crops, their fields, their livestock, and everything else.
In terms of waste management—including disposal, treatment, segregation—they are all important terms, but fundamentally, we need to reduce the size of the waste pie. Producing waste and then thinking it will be taken somewhere else reflects poor calibration. There isn’t enough land available now for disposal sites, and in Kashmir, most of the land has been taken up by ghost properties called complexes—euphemisms for an economy and logic that have gone kaput.
In such a disjointed scenario, if the producer can’t control the waste they generate, why not manage it in their own backyard? Why destroy someone else’s backyard? This is where ‘Not-in-my-backyard’ (NIMBY) sets in. NIMBY isn’t just about resistance but an assertion that the host population of the dumpsite isn’t second to anyone—that they can’t be the punching bags of urban areas’ waste and that their ecological services are theirs to be managed and treasured.
Why should Achan or Anchar bear the brunt of the irresponsibility of the high class or colonised citizens of Srinagar who refuse to look beyond their narrow approach and waterlogged colonies?
If no action is taken now—community participation, proactive authority, and civil society sensitisation—the doom scenario is all too near and real. Remember, it has only been two decades since surface water has almost completely disappeared. Land-cutting and filling are happening at a rare pace, with few precedents anywhere in the world. Such terraforming, without reason, can only be called mental derangement.
Reuse, reduce, recycle (3Rs) is only a slogan with negligible rates of circularity in any segment of the economy. Relying on groundwater, with soil compaction and consolidation reducing its capacity to recharge reserves, is unsustainable. It is clear, with evidence, that the very existence of the people in these places is precariously held, and it is an out-and-out negative scenario.
Nowadays, on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, you see reels of people advertising sales—clothes, second-hand rags, and poorly manufactured ‘branded’ garments. It’s a business that sustains people in the absence of employment. According to the UN Environment Programme, the industry is the second-largest consumer of water and is responsible for about 10% of global carbon emissions—more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined.
A 2017 report from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimated that 35% of all microplastics—tiny pieces of non-biodegradable plastic—found in the ocean come from laundering synthetic textiles like polyester.
Why, of all places, should Kashmir—with its verdant beauty and scenery—become the dump yard for the world’s second-hand fast-fashion clothes? All for the sake of employment!
In any locality, it’s important to understand that it isn’t just about somebody’s waste or my waste. It has to be about collective waste. The effort, if not initiated by authorities, must be driven by the people. It can’t be a highway—one-way—producing colonies known for high consumption and consumerism.
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