Description of the podcast:

In today’s world, where the world economy is about to reach $100 trillion, consumerism is at its peak. At the same time, one of the SDGs focuses on reducing global waste. Achieving it requires collective action from people, communities, and leaders worldwide, but currently, the action is less than ideal. The more we consume, the more waste is generated at a monumental cost to the environment and the people having to deal with its consequences. 

But those who do are at risk of exploitation. Living in waste-picker colonies with below-par working conditions, sometimes often hazardous in nature, people working with waste face the worst consequences of our collective behavior. 

In our chat with socioentrapreneur Wilma Rodrigues from Saahas Zero Waste, we discuss the challenges faced in achieving the SDG through stories of her NGO-turned-business model and solutions, both at the individual and collective levels so lives are transformed effectively and efficiently.

Transcript

Wilma: Less than 10% of plastic is actually being recycled globally.

As consumers, we’re concerned now about our environment. So, we don’t want marketing and advertising to just tell us how great we are if we are, you know, using a certain brand.

Aishwarya: Stories have driven people together for centuries now, and dialogues have led to the development of the world as we know it today.

This is why we’re introducing our new podcast series, Impact Dialogues, geared towards the new generation in mind, where storytelling meets purpose.

Together, we’ll exchange stories with changemakers who work with people and communities to improve their lives and, ultimately, the world.

I have amongst us Wilma Rodrigues, who is a profound inspiration on all of us here.

Working as a socioentrepreneur for over two decades, Wilma specializes in holistic and sustainable waste management.

Her efforts led to Saahas Zero Waste, which began as an NGO, but is now a full-fledged, thriving business that helps other organizations deal with their waste sustainably.

Thank you so much for joining us, Wilma.

Wilma: Thank you.

Aishwarya: There’s garbage, and then there is waste.

Wilma: Yeah

Aishwarya: What is the difference between the two, and what is the importance of that difference too? Because most of us fail to acknowledge that there is a difference.

Wilma: So garbage is this big heap of, you know, mountains of waste that we see in our landfills or what we see in our dump sites on the road, on the streets.

This mixed waste which you can’t make any sense of and which you just have to, you know, burn sometimes in the open, sometimes in waste of energy plants, put in landfills, that’s garbage.

But waste is materials. Waste is something which is, you know, we have used something and as a result of that there are products that are created that we don’t have any use for. That is waste which can actually go through different layers of collection, sorting, aggregation and then recycling to bring it back. So that is the difference between garbage and waste.

Waste is something that you put back; garbage is something that you discard. And, you know, you dump it, and you don’t have a way in which that’ll come back to use.

Aishwarya: Right. Could you give us any examples that in which ways we can utilize the waste again?

Wilma: So when you cook in your kitchen, right, so there you have all the lovely peels: the vegetable peels. You have an orange peel, and you can put it to so many different types of uses including making a bio enzyme for cleaning.

You can use all our vegetable peels to go into a compost where you can put it back to the soil.

The soil is where we get all our food from, and we’ve depleted the soils over all of these millions of years. 

And now we again need to enrich our soils compost it so beautifully.

And then, of course, all the other materials which is paper and plastic. We need to bring it back to use, recycle it so that it does not get thrown into garbage dumps.

Aishwarya: So Wilma, we have Sustainable Development Goals defining the very actions that we’ve been taking collectively as a world to improve this place for everyone and one of those SDGs is around reducing global waste.

And part of that discourse is around zero waste.

For those of us who are not exactly sure of what that means, could you please help explain that to us? Where did it come from?

Did it come from the SDGS, or did it exist before then as well, and if so, what does it look like in the Indian context?

Wilma: Yeah, so you know, the concept of zero waste is quite a nice theory.

And when I say theory because, you know, right now, that’s what it seems to be.

You know that here is a society that over the last 50, 60, 100 years, has incrementally increased consumption.

And on that account, we have large problems around waste. Now, SDG, definitely quite a few of the SDGs talk about reduction in consumption.

So, therefore, definitely, our attention to waste is very closely associated with the SDGs.

Now, when we say zero waste, we mean that we bring back all the materials that we have used in our consumption, put it back, bring it back to our soils, bring it back to our manufacturing and bring it back to us for use.

So, really, we have to be a very conscious consumer when we look at consumption.

So to break it down and make it very simple, we have in India about 62 million tons of waste generated every year.

And about 60% is organic in nature. And there is the paper, plastic, metal, glass, which we defined as a recyclable or dry waste. And then, there are the fractions of sani (sanitary) waste and hazardous waste.

Now, if we were to have a zero-waste lifestyle, we would really want to cut down all our single use items. Because that’s where, you know, you have so much of consumption and materials being used.

So things like, you know, simple things, day-to-day things: paper cups, tissues, the cutlery, we would not want to have that in our lives.

So, reduce the single-use but make sure that whatever we do use comes back.

So you would compost your organic waste, and you could compost it at home. You would reduce your use of things like plastic bags or single-use items. Carry your own shopping bag.

So there are so many things that one can do to have a zero-waste lifestyle, but it has to be more than an intent.

It has to be a change in lifestyle which is going to not really cause any inconvenience. We’ve got to look at it as enhancing our lifestyle.

Aishwarya: That’s true. And where did this concept come about from? Was it here before SDGs or?

Wilma: Yeah, it’s coming from the fact that we all now know that consumption is causing a lot of problems to the environment.

The fact that, you know, we are extracting materials to feed into that consumption. And so we’ve got to go back to where, you know, 40-50 years where we did not have these kind of consumption levels.

So, it’s a movement across the world to bring attention to the problems around excessive consumption.

Aishwarya: So, Wilma, your career trajectory has been very interesting. You began as a tour guide, then became a journalist and now, you’re a socioentrepreneur and you were one of the first ones to do what you did back in 2013.

Aishwarya: What was that journey like? Could you tell us about it?

Wilma: Yeah, so you mentioned tour guide, right, and so actually, that was the beginning of the journey for waste.

Because, you know, there was this situation when you are showing, as a guide, the best of your country, right.

And India, for me, was so much to offer to all kinds of tourists. And there is one incident when we were at the Madurai temple. The Meenakshi temple in Madurai, where, you know, you kind of celebrate the architecture.

But at the same time, you step out of the temple, and this was in the early 80s that I’m talking about.

We stepped out of the temple with this huge waste dump that was there, even in the 80s.

And then, you know, you do have tourists saying, and that was the time when I was in my 20s and had to confront the fact that India was quite negligent in its waste management.

So, from that point of wanting to do something to then 2001, when we had, for the first time, in India, the municipal solid waste rules.

The municipal solid waste rules talked about waste, talked about how waste is a resource and should come back to use and should not be put into dump site, should not become garbage in a dump site.

And so this was the starting point for me to step in, to actually elicit change that was required.

So first, we started Saahas as an NGO because, unfortunately, or fortunately, you know, it was the NGO sector that was expected to provide solutions for waste management.

So, we started with the focus on reduce.

So reduce consumption of plastic.

We had a campaign called ‘Less Plastic for Me’ to really support people who wanted to reduce their plastic footprint.

But over a few years, we realized that, you know, the NGO sector cannot be the answer to waste management.

Because waste management does need a lot of more complex intervention.

It does need infrastructure; it needs behavioral change; it needs good back-end systems in terms of processing, in terms of recycling technologies.

And, therefore, the NGO can play an important, significant role but not a complete solution.

So, in 2013, we had a second entity for Saahas, which was registered as a for-profit business model, Saahas Waste Management Pvt. Ltd. or Saahas Zero Waste.

Now, the idea of a business model is to provide holistic services and end-to-end services and continuous services like any other, you know, delivery of any service.

Waste Management also comes into that into that domain of a service delivery and, as a business model, as a social enterprise, the first focus is on environmental and social impact.

So, when you look at environment and the impact, the focus is on resource recovery.

The focus is on no waste going to a dump site, bring your waste going to landfill to as low as 5%, and that’s where we were offering services to bulk generators, to corporate campuses, to large apartments, you know, to make sure that all the waste which is organic gets composted or goes into bio CNG.

All your dry waste that’s collected, sorted, aggregated does not go into any dumpsite or landfill but goes into proper processing.

Of course, reduce becomes the big important part, and in all of these solutions that we had, the generator had to be equally responsible.

So the generator was there as our customer and we were responsible, the joint partnership, to make sure that the waste generated is tracked, traced, processed and doesn’t go into an environmental degradation kind of situation.

So that is what we are even today, Saahas Zero Waste.

As a business model, but a social enterprise, we balance both of these things together.

Aishwarya: That sounds like quite a journey and I’m sure there must have been challenges around that area as well, considering that you were one of the first business models around this kind of work. Can you tell us any challenges that you may have faced?

Wilma: Now, the challenges that we faced were that people were not willing to pay a service fee.

And that is, you know, so sad in India. We believe that we have a large informal sector, and we’re doing this great job, we’re providing a livelihood, but a livelihood is so that people can actually have a house, can send their children to school, can have access to health, and, you know, our informal sectors are not able to do that.

So when I’m, you know, saying that we provide, through this business model, and we have a team of 300 now. 70% of them are from the base of the pyramid, and I am still saying that you know, the satisfaction point is that we’re paying them minimum wages.

That’s not what it’s meant to be. Because if you look at minimum wages, it’s still too low.

In Bangalore, which is one of the biggest cities, that has a good structure around minimum wages. It’s about 18,000 rupees, minimum wages.

But after you cut off ESI, PF, what they get in hand is barely about 13 to 14K.

Aishwarya: In a city like Bangalore.

Wilma: Yes, so definitely, India has to do better, and definitely the waste generators, our middle-class, our upper-middle class, even our lower-middle class should be conscious of the fact that you know, the environmental problems come about because, we’re not taking care of waste. And we need to take care of people working with waste.

Aishwarya: So, Wilma, in your experience, you’ve worked quite a lot with marginalized communities, especially people who were previously informal employees but are now formal employees of Saahas. And I’m sure, in your interactions with other sectors where there is informal employment, you must have had a lot of experience there. And I’m sure that there are stories behind all those people working in that sector.

Do you have any stories that you can share with us?

Wilma: Now, you know, it is unfortunate that we have these large number of people working informally. They would receive waste from various different sources: large corporate offices, apartment complexes, even hospitals.

And that is actually quite illegal because, remember, we’ve got good waste management rules that accept and acknowledge that people should get paid, should work with proper infrastructure, and definitely should not work in the kind of waste picker colonies that we see.

But really we need to, you know, I would really encourage people because in every city and, even in our smaller cities, we have these little colonies where people start with their hands actually, sorting waste and this is most often waste which is contaminated with organic stuff.

For instance, a hotel, let me just say even a 5-star hotel, very often gives its waste to the informal sector. I would say to a contractor or to somebody working informally.

And this waste then comes to a waste picker colony and in this waste picker colony, you do have children who are there as part of the families of waste pickers.

Very often, you see animals, you know, dogs, and you know all kinds of animals also there, picking out on some kind of organic stuff that comes in and in that, you will have sanitary waste.

Most hospitals sometimes, again, illegally, the smaller clinics, etc., the waste comes in there, and very often, you even see syringes in that situation.

So, and we work to change that.

Aishwarya: Now that zero waste is becoming a movement, it’s not only about waste disposal; it’s about zero waste living, as you had mentioned before.

And more and more younger people are getting involved in the conversation because everyone wants positive change, and everyone wants to be involved in that movement and with policies like Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan, with SDGs guiding all of our actions towards making this world a better place. Where do you see this industry going in terms of the data surrounding it?

What kind of data do we need to tackle our waste, and if we have that kind of data, what do we do with it?

Wilma: So, on zero waste, so you know, you said a movement, but I think it’s far from a movement currently.

It’s a great idea, it’s a good intention, but when we say zero waste, we would expect people’s behaviors to change.

For instance, today, I’ll just just give you a very simple example. Tissues are still so, you know, used so extensively: whether it’s in an airport, in a restaurant, to wipe our hands.

We can’t seem to, you know, have a get-together without using tissues.

So, what are we talking about when we say zero waste?

Is it not possible for us to have the handkerchief as a symbol of convenience rather than this tissues or these paper cups or these one-time use cutlery which has to travel long distances in order for it to bring that convenience to us?

And then if it has to travel again, you know, really a long distance for it to be recycled. Most often, it gets contaminated with organics, and then you can forget any form of recycling.

So, the zero-waste movement, if we have to call it that, has to be around a big shift in our behavior, and this shift in our behavior comes from regulations. Because then you will see, you know, that tissues are not made so easily accessible to us. There will be a big price point around it, which will be a deterrent, and you will see that, you know, then you will see things really changing.

But right now, the zero-waste movement is good to have, good intentions, but far from really bringing about the kind of behavioral change.

Because even with our use of packaging, we still want to see industry start embracing reuse.

Aishwarya: Right.

Wilma: We would want to see the beverage industry not put out so many bottles and say, “okay I’m moving from, you know, plastic to another material.”

Some of them are saying to paper, and between paper and plastic, both of them are equally monstrous, if I might use a strong word.

Because we know the paper footprint, we know the amount of materials that are used to produce the paper. So in this zero waste movement, we will need policy, we will need government, we will need industry, and we’ll need the consumer working together to actually enable that to happen.

Also, when you look at the world economy, the world economy if it is around give or take, it’s around 100 trillion dollars. And 50% of that economy actually comes from nature.

So, you have our clothing, our food, all the manufacturing raw materials coming from nature and yet, in today’s economy, we talk circular economy, but we are not closing the loop by putting things back to nature.

So, just to come back to what you are asking on the data, the fact is that I don’t think we are really putting our minds to actually bringing out the right data points. We have been told over the last 40-50 years that plastic can be recycled and, so therefore, this explosive use of plastic.

But we know today that less than 10% of plastic is actually being recycled globally.

In India, the plastic recycling rates are slightly better, but they’re still dismally very low because you have mostly items like your PT bottles or your rigid shampoo bottles which are being recycled.

Now, the larger part of plastic waste is the flexibles, is the packaging of biscuits and chips etc., which is getting neglected.

And also, the manner in which I already described, the informal sector who have been responsible largely for recycling. So all of that data is available, is there in bits and pieces, but we really need to push it out there so that informed decisions are being taken.

And when I say informed decisions, it means that definitely industry has to make some changes so that this waste which comes out of their businesses is equally addressed.

You may know that the policy today is talking of Extended Producer Responsibility. And extended producer responsibility is focusing on plastic waste, is focusing on electronic waste.

It needs to be there for all kinds of end-of-life materials. Definitely for paper, definitely for glass, definitely for textile waste. Today, most of our textiles is got 50-60-70% plastic in it. A lot of it is, when it’s washed, is going into sewage systems and then to riverine, etc. as microplastic.

So imagine if you put all of this under scrutiny with brands, etc., declaring how much of plastic is there in their textiles, with brands declaring in their packaging how much of it is paper, how much of it is plastic, and therefore, what one is expected to do. Right now, they just put a little symbol saying ‘recyclable’ and you know they get away with it. So we want more disclosures because as consumers, we’re concerned now about our environment.

So, we don’t want marketing and advertising to just tell us how great we are if we are using a certain brand. What is it doing to our environment should also be disclosed in that product, and then we make our choices.

Aishwarya: And that’s the kind of data we need.

Wilma: And that’s the kind of data we need.

Aishwarya: This has been an absolute pleasure, Wilma. It has been a great conversation, a stimulating conversation, and we’ve learned a lot, and I hope we can say the same for our audiences.

Thank you so much for your time.

Wilma: Very nice. Thank you. 

Aishwarya: We spoke to Wilma Rodrigues about the work that she and her team have been doing. There was so much that I didn’t know about waste management that I got to know from our conversation today, which is what Impact Dialogues is all about: tracking change makers and the transformation they bring into our lives.

Thank you for joining us today. Stay tuned for the next episode.