• Municipal Solid Waste

With massive growth of urban population, India is facing a major waste management challenges. Total 377 million people live in 7,935 cities, and towns generate around 62 million tonnes of municipal solid waste annually. Out of that merely 43 million tonnes (MT) of the municipal waste is collected, 11.9 MT is treated, and 31 MT is dumped in landfill. Solid Waste Management (SWM) is one among the crucial services provided by municipal bodies in the urban centers remain clean. Now major urban centres takes an initiative to collect segregated waste at source. The key initiatives for waste management are segregation at source and to ensure that waste gets treated through various process such as waste recycling, waste to energy and resource recovery. The clean India and smart cities mission gives guidelines to manage the urban waste management by maximize the resource recovery and processes and ensure that it will not landfill it. The Centre Government aims to do a way with landfill sites in 20 major cities. There is no additional land for dumping garbage, and the existing ones are in a critical state.

• Construction and Demolition (C&D) Waste

It is estimated that 12 to 14.7 million tonnes of C&D waste is generated across India per annum. In March 2016, the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEFCC) had notified the Construction and Demolition Waste Management Rules, 2016. The draft guidelines batted for “project specific C&D Waste Management Plans for those (projects) generating more than 20 tonnes or more in one day or 300 tonnes per project in a month of installed capacity in cities with more than million plus population.

• Industrial Wastes

Rapid industrialization has led to generate huge quantity of wastes, both solid and liquid, in industrial sectors such as pulp and paper, sugar, food processing, starch, distilleries, dairies, tanneries etc. Despite stringent pollution control measures, these wastes are generally dumped on land or discharged into water bodies, without adequate treatment, and thus become a large source of environmental pollution and health hazard. Hazardous wastes, which may be in solid, liquid or gaseous form, may cause danger, either alone or when in contact with other wastes. Various agencies have defined hazardous wastes in different ways and as such, there is no uniformly accepted international definition so far. It is presumed that about 10 to 15 percent of wastes produced by industries are hazardous and the generation of hazardous wastes is increasing at the rate of 2 to 5 percent per year.

• E-waste

The country’s burgeoning population on mobile phones and millions of computers in use and plethora of other electronics gadgets. India is now in the global list of major electronic waste generators, posing grave threat to the environment and public alike. The e-waste management market, which is regularised compared to other solid waste, is expected to grow at 10.03 percent and the bio-medical waste management market is expected to grow at 8.41 percent during the same period. Unfortunately, India is highly ill-equipped in terms of both legislation and skilled labour to handle e-waste recycling. E-waste is generally handle by unorganised sector, it is estimated that unorganised sector contributes over 95 per cent of ewaste generated in India and it is not surprising that they are not very adept at it. Most of the waste is dumped in rivers, lakes or canals, causing irreparable damage to the environment.