Let’s Talk Trash: Launch of Waste Advisory Services

Despite its importance to circular economy, waste management is often overlooked within companies and isn’t something that is considered core to operations. Improper handling of waste is causing major damage to the environment and at the same time also exposes companies to risks that can impact their business.

Sandeep Raghuwanshi, CEO of ESGRobo, and Mohini Acharya, CEO of Sunrays Compost, have come onboard as partners to launch waste advisory services in India. They bring decades of joint experience in corporate sustainability and industrial waste management. They highlight some of the elementary mistakes companies make which not only cause immense environmental damage but also results in higher operating costs for them.

Some common mistakes companies make

Not segregating waste streams at source

One multinational food processing company that manufactures fruit and vegetable pulps, mayonnaise etc doesn’t segregate significant part of their waste. Almost half of the waste stream of the company contains organic waste content mixed with packaging. Since the handling charges for mixed waste is almost 40% more than that of clean organic material, company ends up paying much more for their waste. Beyond company gates, it creates serious challenges. Clean organic waste stream has potential for extraction of valuable products for animal consumption. However, since the mix given by the company contains even broken glass containers, it becomes nonviable to segregate and process it even with squeezers or other mechanical separators available with waste processing facilities. As a result material recovery possibilities greatly diminish, turnaround cycles and costs for handlers increase and eventually most of it is just incinerated.

Segregating but then mixing up again

A biotech company has two waste streams. The company has invested in systems to reduce cell mass content from one of their non-hazardous waste stream by hydraulic press. This reduces the volume as well as handling challenges. The company waste are collected daily by a transporter to be transferred to their waste management vendor’s facilities. While loading the waste, the two streams are mixed up again by the handlers in same lorry. This denies any benefit of the entire investment and processes deployed by the company for ETP and separation, and the challenges for the recovery facilities to handle it meaningfully remain same as they are for unsegregated waste streams. This is not dissimilar to what is currently witnessed with Municipal Waste collection in most cities. While segregation has improved, the waste collectors mix up the waste while transporting.

Policy errors in selection of waste handlers

An industrial company with facilities in outskirts of a major metropolitan area generates a significant amount of waste. The company’s purchase selection process is conditioned to look for best price while selecting their vendors. The target metrics are primarily how to minimize the number of lorries and maximize load in each. However, a single minded focus on cost ends up in company regularly selecting vendors that either do not have necessary infrastructure to handle the waste or do not handle waste in a scientific manner. One of the vendor selected by the company for waste management was nothing more than owner of fleet of lorries that collected waste streams and tipped them in nearby empty quarries, low lying areas and river beds. The illegally dumped waste included hazardous waste along with inert waste.

Effect of lapses in industrial waste management

The key to efficient waste management is ensuring proper segregation of waste at source and ensuring that each waste stream goes through most optimal recycling and resource recovery. Subsequently, the reduced final residue shall be disposed scientifically.The handling cost, material recovery process as well as disposal options vary considerably by waste types — hazardous vs nonhazardous waste, segregated vs mixed waste etc. But short of segregation, most companies don’t care enough to even categorize their waste scientifically. It not only increases cost of handling but often makes any form of processing and recovery either inefficient or even nonviable.

Illegal waste dumps are known to have serious adverse impacts on the environment and public health. The impacts of poor waste management on public health are well documented, with increased incidences of nose and throat infections, breathing difficulties, inflammation, bacterial infections, anemia, reduced immunity, allergies, asthma and other infections.

Conclusions

Violations of environment friendly industrial waste management are widespread, taking many different forms. Part of the problem lies with the companies where waste is not managed holistically and they don’t take full responsibility of the waste they generate. Companies not only lack processing capabilities, there is also very little understanding of the subject. For most, the objective is getting rid of waste from their premises. Besides this, the waste sector suffers from weak regulatory enforcement. Players with little or sometimes no scientific means of waste treatment compete with organised players distorting market pricing and are preventing development of a proper waste sector. The end result is waste ending up depositing it as litter somewhere or being treated sub-optimally.

There is tremendous scope for improvement, and with proper attention being paid companies can not only achieve better outcomes but also generate significant cost savings in the process.

Waste Advisory Service Offering

Center for ESG Resources (CER) waste advisory services include:

• Assessment of how materials move into, through, and out of the organization.
• Analysis of quantity, type and quality of waste.
• Improving material selection and substitution.
• Identifying opportunities for waste prevention.
• Circularity measures in own operations, upstream and downstream value chain.
• Implementation of monitoring system to collect and monitor waste related data.
• Setting up procurement policies from suppliers and vendor selection criteria.
• Identification of opportunities to participate in a collective or individual extended producer responsibility scheme.
• Identification of opportunities to apply product stewardship, which extends the producer’s responsibility to end of life.
• Assistance in setting up of take-back or reverse logistics process to divert materials from disposal.
• End-of-life interventions including assistance to facilities for waste management, material recovery, collection and sorting of waste.