Context and Rationale
Most discussion of economics of municipal waste in India stops at two numbers: what it costs a city to collect and process waste (OPEX), and what it costs to build facilities (CAPEX). Unfortunately, this leaves out a large part of the real bill. Waste that is not segregated at source becomes more expensive to handle at every step after it, and much of it ends up in legacy landfills. Those landfills go on imposing costs long after the waste arrives: methane emissions and recurring fires, leachate in groundwater, health burdens on nearby residents and waste workers, lost land value, and the eventual cost of remediation.
Under our Optimising Municipal Waste program, EPIC India has spent time examining these costs in Hyderabad, one of India’s largest cities and home to the Jawahar Nagar integrated waste management facility. This event launches the two outputs of that work:
- Report 1 – Hyderabad’s municipal waste flow: How waste moves from households, waste workers and private companies through collection, transfer, processing and disposal; where the chain leaks; and what segregation costs and saves at each stage.
- Report 2 – A cost-benefit analysis tool for Indian landfills: A generic tool, tested on Hyderabad, that values landfill waste disposal and processing options beyond CAPEX and OPEX by including environmental and social costs and benefits.
The two reports tell one story: the first shows how waste reaches the landfill and what it costs to get there; the second shows what the landfill costs everyone once it is there. Because the CBA tool is designed to be generic, it is directly relevant to other cities dealing with legacy dumpsites or planning to build a new waste management facility. As the current phase of Swachh Bharat Mission – Urban 2.0 draws to a close, how cities choose between remediation options, and who pays, is becoming more pressing.