Clean Pakistan: Encouraging recycling, a household at a time

Encouraging recycling, a household at a time. PHOTO: FILE

LAHORE: 

“Clean Pakistan aims to target 500 urban union councils, it will create more than 15,000 jobs [social motivators and sanitary workers] whose salaries will add Rs2 billion to the economy.

In addition, an estimated Rs3 billion will be generated from recycling and waste collection activities,” Waste Busters CEO Asif Farooki told The Express Tribune.

Clean Pakistan campaign workers will collect domestic waste from houses, sort them and recycle waste to be used to manufacture fertiliser and other products.

Implementation plan

Under the project, each city will be divided into zones [union councils]. Each zone will have 10 social motivators to mobilise the community and 20 sanitation workers, preferably from the city district government and town municipal authority. They will work from 10am to 4pm daily.

Social motivators will campaign door to door telling people about the programme, its benefits and service charges. GIS mapping will ascertain the target area, number of streets, houses, commercial areas and waste transfer points.

Each social motivator will be assigned two sanitation workers for 250 houses. They will collect domestic waste in hand carts where a Suzuki pick-up will collect the garbage and take it to a transfer point or waste enclosure in every union council.

The sanitation workers will segregate recyclable materials like bottles, plastic, cans, lined paper packs and papers. They will be weighed every Friday and Waste Busters will purchase them on market rates [not less than Rs5,000/metric tonne] and send it for recycling at a recycling plant on Ferozepur Road.

Organic waste and non-recyclable waste will be taken to a dump site.

An “ecopreneur” will collect the service charges.

Inorganic waste will be sorted and sold. Used plastic shopping bags will be recycled into plastic wood and used to manufacture chairs, huts, dustbins for parks, Farooki said.

“That leaves us with mostly shopper bags, rags and nappies which can be processed into refuse-derived fuel and sold to the cement industry,” he said. Approximately 60MT of recyclable waste will be collected from each union council and sold to vendors or recycling factories. This will generate an estimated Rs3 billion for the economy and provide income to a sizeable section of the lower income strata, he said.

Franchise plan

Waste Busters will train ecopreneurs in efficient waste management, waste collection and recycling.

Mutawakil Qazi, an ecopreneur from Gujranwala, said, “I have received a very positive response from my community…people are excited to know that concerted efforts are being made to clean up the area and are willing to pay for it.”

The Small and Medium Enterprise Development Authority has included the programme in its list of approved business plans are eligible for the Prime Minister’s Youth Loan Programme. “Ours is a viable business with a plan to return the loan as well, said Farooki.

Tania Qureshi of the Walled City of Lahore Authority said the Waste Busters has been managing solid waste from Delhi Gate to Chowk Kotwali in the Walled City. Their workers clean 57 streets from Delhi Gate to Chowk Kotwali every morning and collect garbage from houses and shops. “We are planning to handover other parts of the Walled City to them as well,” she said.

Waste Busters is presently running similar projects in Green Town, Walled City of Lahore, Defence and Gulshan-i-Ravi.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 2^nd, 2014.