Current lockdown in countries is essential to prevent the spread of the deadly coronavirus are dramatically transforming people’s daily lives across the world. One thing that remains unchanged is that we continue to produce massive amounts of waste each day.
Delhi generates 14000 tonnes all type of waste per day. There is no official data available on how many city households separate their waste before going this waste to landfills.
The need for implementing and ensuring segregation of waste at source is must during the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak in country, said by Madhuri Varshney – A social activist and Founder of RISE Foundation Social Organisation. This habit will not only reduce dumping of waste in landfills and oceans but will also play a crucial role in fighting with COVID-19.
“There should be no handling of garbage with bare hands”. She also urged the municipality to supply safety kits which contain gloves, mask, hand wash/sanitiser bottles to all workers and ragpickers and educate them on how to handle household waste during the outbreak, to help in halting the chain of transmission of COVID-19.
Municipality must revoke the SWM2016 again in Delhi-NCR and advised to citizens to dispose of their garbage in three categories – Compostable/Wet/Kitchen waste (food and other organic waste), Dry/Recyclables waste (metal cans, all size PET/HDPE plastic bottles and other heavy plastic objects, cardboards) and Biomedical waste (tissues, masks, gloves, sanitizer bottles). People need to dispose of their used napkins, tissues, empty sanitizer bottles in a separate bag, to ensure the safety of municipal workers and ragpickers.
Madhuri Varshney shared viewpoints on importance of waste segregation at source and awareness of residents why this is need of hour. She said if we sensitive towards our current COVID-19 situation and care our environment then we must initiate our own without having dependency on government machinery. A single step one day will become a revolution.
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RISE Foundation (NGO) 