by Jessica Sherman
Waste-free. This is a notion that strikes many of us as impossible. Plastic grocery bags choking rivers. Waste dumped directly into water sources. Incinerators pumping toxic fumes into the air. These are realities of our lifestyle as global consumers and producers. Every day commuting to work, shopping at the grocery store, and constantly running our multitude of household appliances and electronics, we solidify the pattern.
In India, there are those who think otherwise about the potential for a clean, healthy environment. Not only do they think otherwise—they now have achieved what they once were told was a utopian dream: plans for a waste-free state. The President of India, Pratibha Devisingh Patil, has just released an action plan that will make Kerala, a tourism hotspot on India’s southern coast, a ‘Zero Waste’ state over the next five years.
Zero Waste is a concept that promotes intensive recycling, reuse, and reduction in the production of waste from the start. It is a holistic approach being pursued by citizen action groups around the world. But in very few places has it transformed into an official action plan.
This precedent-setting policy in India was made possible by the hard work of Thanal, a grassroots group that first spearheaded the movement for Zero Waste in the town of Kovalam, Kerala. Since 2000, Thanal has received eight grants totaling nearly $25,000 in support of their work toward achieving a waste-free Kerala. Greengrants’ newest member of the India Advisory Board, Usha S. is also the group’s Program Director.
This latest achievement demonstrates the impact that citizen groups can have on creating concrete policy change. The Zero Waste plan for Kerala is the outcome of intensive community involvement and collaboration with government advisory panels, Total Sanitation Mission and the Clean Kerala Mission. Thanal provided, on a volunteer basis, recommendations for the policy formulation, and co-drafted the final action plan.
“This is an exciting day for us,” says Shibu K. Nair of Thanal. “After all of our campaigning, the government’s plan recognizes our work in Kovalam and recommends replicating it.”
Tourism: Waste Not, Want Not
Kerala, at the southern tip of India, became a tourist destination in the 1980s and is known for its spectacular beaches. Despite a lag after the 2004 tsunami, today, visitors are at an all-time high, and these numbers are expected to increase 20% annually.
However, thriving tourism was not always the case. In the late 1990s, Kerala was caught in a garbage crisis. The area lacked the physical and regulatory infrastructure to handle the increased tourism pressures. As a result, the area became polluted with mounds of garbage and plastic bag-clogged cesspools. The number of tourists dropped significantly—no one wanted to vacation in an area polluted by trash.
To resolve this problem, in 1999 the Kerala Tourism Departmentproposed an incinerator to address the garbage crisis. Residents and environmental groups, including Thanal, rose up in protest against the project due to the air pollution and health problems associated with waste incineration. Jayakumar Chelaton, Director of Thanal, emerged as an environmental leader who proposed to address the garbage problem without the use of an incinerator. Chelaton organized an international campaign that generated a flood of emails written by potential tourists from around the world to the Tourism Ministry, urging it not to pollute the region with an incinerator. The Ministry recalled its incinerator plan and turned to Thanal for guidance.
Zero Waste Treats the Source
The leaders of Thanal envisioned a solution that didn’t just seek to find a place to store waste, but to design waste out of the system through a combination of waste prevention, re-use, recycling, and composting. The project was dubbed Zero Waste Kovalam. Thanal’s leadership, combined with the desperation of the tourism industry to address the garbage problem, set the stage for a groundbreaking project that continues today and now extends beyond Kovalam to the entire state of Kerala.
The idea behind Zero Waste is to not only treat waste in environmentally-friendly ways, but to also drastically reduce the amount of waste that is produced in the first place. Zero Waste Kovalam’s formula is simple: replace unsustainable materials with sustainable ones; train people to produce these materials, creating jobs while reducing waste; and provide access to funds to support people who are setting up sustainably-run businesses based on Zero Waste principles. Composting and recycling are not groundbreaking activities, but done in a consistent and widespread way, they can change the face of trash issues.
Some of Thanal’s achievements include:
- Implementing facilities that use biodegradable wastes from hotels to generate electricity. The facilities separate biodegradable discards and then instead of tossing them into a stinky landfill, use them in a fermentation process to generate methane gas (bio-gas), which then can be used in a generator to produce electricity. The initiative convinced hotels to operate in clusters and set up three bio-gas units that diverted one ton of garbage per day from the landfill into meeting energy needs. There are now more than 25 such facilities in municipalities throughout the state.
- Creating a Zero Waste Center to make sustainable materials. The Center promotes handmade products made from paper, jute, coconut shells, and cloth discards as substitutes for plastics and other unsustainable materials. Three entrepreneurial units now are run by local women who make the products and sell them to local restaurants and hotels to replace disposable plastics, and to tourists as souvenirs. The Center has generated 200 jobs, a significant number for this small community.
- Promoting Zero Waste principles for the broader community. Education is a key component of the Zero Waste plan. Education campaigns are aimed at hotels, local vendors, and schoolchildren. The project also educates tourists, with the intention that they will take these concepts and practices back to their home countries and states, which tend to have even greater waste and consumption problems than those in Kovalam. From Kovalam to Kerala—to the World
What started as a fight to stop an incinerator has resulted in a multi-faceted, holistic process of transforming the local community into a more sustainable place. The Zero Waste Kovalam Project is entirely community-based and stands as a clear demonstration of the ability of grassroots community action to make a real difference for local lands and livelihoods. The end result is a healthier community, cleaner environment, and more inviting landscape for tourists to explore and enjoy.
The Zero Waste Kovalam project has received attention from around the world. In 2005, inspired by Zero Waste Kovalam, the Philippines announced Zero Waste tourism as goal for its own tourism authority. Greengrants also has funded Zero Waste initiatives in communities from South Africa to Malaysia to Argentina. As the movement builds, it becomes all the more necessary to put continued pressure on governments to create innovative policies.
Shibu K. Nair of Thanal notes that the work is just starting: “The coming days and months will be the real challenge. We need to fully focus on working with the state government, as there are still many ‘experts’ advising them to go for incineration, land fills, and other projects that we are fighting against. The task now is to ensure that we move in right direction, now that the action plan is in place.”