Sunita Narain: The colour of waste

DOWN TO EARTH

The characteristics of wastewater are an important measure of society's progress to modernity. If the water has biological contaminants it can be presumed that society is still water-traditional and poor, as it does not have the ability to treat its human sewage and other organic wastes. If the water is full of chemical toxins then society is progressing towards the next phase of water-industrial use, but is still poor as it cannot clean the water before discharge. If the water has cocktails of trace toxic pollutants "" from arsenic and mercury to hormones and pesticides to even more deadly dioxins and furans "" then the society is truly industrialised and rich. It uses huge quantities of products, which contain these chemicals, it also spends huge amounts to treat its effluents, but it is finding that traces "" deadly and toxic "" escape its best efforts. It needs to continuously upgrade its treatment plants and effluent standards to track and treat the new characteristics of its wastewater.

What then would one say of waters, where all three characteristics of waste "" biological, crude chemical and modern chemical "" are found? This wastewater is clearly reflective of a society in various stages of economic growth. But it is also a society, which, as it grows, is finding itself incapable and unable to treat its waste. It is accumulating all waste and all costs of treatment as it progresses towards higher levels of industrialisation.

In simple terms, it is society in deep trouble. It has a double-burden of pollution to treat "" traditional and modern. It also has a double-burden of diseases to treat "" the traditional water-borne diseases, which still result in unacceptable human morbidity and mortality, and the modern chemicals, which result in diseases such cancers and other genetic disorders that are expensive to treat.

It is also a fact that modern technologies for cleaning waste are out of reach from this waste-accumulated society. They are too expensive to install and even more expensive to run. The problem is that even as industry has universalised the use of its chemicals and other pollutants, it has not worked hard to universalise the answers needed to mitigate its deadly discharge. The reason is that industry has treated waste as a business "" it must be profitable to treat. This principle works when society has money to pollute and also to treat. But in large parts of poor and polluted countries of the South like India, there is little money to treat on its human excreta, let alone its modern chemical waste.

The challenge is to reinvent the paradigm of waste treatment by reinventing the paradigm of waste generation itself. But to do this, we must discuss, not just the cost of inaction, but understand the cost of political action, which will force this technological and societal change. I believe it can be done. The fact is that the environmental movement of the North came at a time when the society had already created wealth and was generating waste. The political action was driven by waste managers. But in the industrialising South, the movement for change is growing at a time when it is generating waste in the midst of poverty. Its political managers will need to be much more than drain inspectors and cleaners. They will have to change the nature of the drain itself.