[0:19]Okay, so this is a new course now on uh integrated waste management for a smart city. So we have been, we are offering this course for the first time uh at NPTL and as well as, I think it will be on Swayam platform as well. So this is uh this course uh is focused on urban issues. As you can uh the main focus of this course will be on municipal solid waste, in the short form we call it MSW. It is the waste that I and you produced in an urban environment. It's also it's a municipal waste, it's uh so what the word as it suggest municipal waste means the waste is produced in a municipality. So that's the municipal waste. We will also talk about construction and demolition waste, which is another big area of waste stream. Even the new MSW management rules 2016 has identified CND waste as one of the major waste stream uh for for its management. So that's the CND waste, we will also uh be covered in this particular course and so as electronic waste management. So, the way I have uh thought about this course is uh we have this is a 12 week course. So the first eight weeks will be focusing on municipal solid waste, which is the biggest chunk of this course. Then two weeks will spend on construction and demolition waste and two weeks on electronic waste. So that's uh what I have been uh talking about but like my my plan is. Uh as you know if you have if you have taken NPTL course before or if you are taking it for the first time, usually we will uh have a discussion board running and so which will be there. So there will be a discussion board which uh you can participate, I will encourage you to participate. In fact, I will encourage each of one you to to introduce yourself in the discussion board and then why you are taking this code. So that we know uh your interest, so that if there are certain things which we need to include in the into the course content, we'll try to do that. And uh but it has to be relevant to the course, of course. So, introduce yourself in the discussion board, uh whatever queries you have, uh ask in the discussion board, we will have uh people looking at the discussion board almost every day and trying to respond to your query on a daily day to day basis. And uh so welcome to this course again and let's get started. Um myself is uh I'm Brajesh Kumar Dubey. I'm a faculty member in the Department of Civil Engineering uh at IIT Kharagpur and I'll uh so I already talked about.
[2:51]And I'll give you in this particular week, this is the first week. Uh during this particular week, we'll be doing a course overview. So, we'll have uh we'll what we'll do is this is a snapshot of uh uh the different issues that is there in terms of the waste management. So that's uh like a big picture will be shown in this particular week. And then in the subsequent week, we'll go in more detail, more depth uh for each and every component of uh of uh the waste management and more focused on municipal solid waste management for the first eight weeks. So before we go into the course, uh I wanted to give you a little bit background about myself. Uh I am uh I as I mentioned, my name is Brajesh Dubey. I have my BTech in Civil Engineering from this institute, from where you are taking this course, it's from IIT Kharagpur. And then I I have worked in industry for some time. And after working in industry for seven, I decided to go for my PhD. So I went uh to University of Florida and in environmental engineering and sciences department there. And the focus was on waste management. So the my research group, where from where I got my PhD, my PhD advisor is Professor Timothy Townson, and uh he had was one of the leading uh he is still is one of the leading researcher in the area of waste management.
[4:15]So that's from under his lab, in his lab, I have done my PhD. Then I worked in in several places in Florida, and in in New Zealand, in USA, in Canada. And after working for several places, I came back to India and joined my Alma Mater as Associate Professor in March 2015. So I spent nearly 14 years overseas and working on waste management. Uh luckily for me, I had a chance to work on several aspects of waste management in North America. I've done some projects for United Nations in Africa. We also did some work in China, and uh I do go to China and teach every every year uh, again, this summer, I'll be visiting China and teach on life cycle analysis, which is my other course on LPTL, which was offered last semester.
[5:10]And uh so that's I I do teach alternatively, one one one one year I teach solid waste, one year I teach life cycle.
[5:25]And my in as a part of a my program in China for like a short term course, it's a small course. So after working, I've been working in India since March 2015. And my major area of work is on waste management, as well as life cycle analysis. So those are the two areas where I focus on and they are connected. As those of you who have taken my LCA course, you may have seen that I have talked about life cycle, I have talked about waste management is lot lot in LCA course. And similarly things will do over here as well. I'll be talking about LCA as well how the LCA is used for waste management. This it's a very important area in terms of the overlap between LCA and waste management. And then I do exist uh in uh social platform which is uh very common these days. You need to be to to have a joke on this. Earlier if you watched there was there used to be a show on Doordarshan, Doordarshan is that Indian official channel. There to called ulta pulth which is uh Bhatti uh Jaspal Bhatti. And he had a one episode where he would talk about that if you don't have the ration card. Many people don't have ration card today, but if you don't have ration card, you don't really exist in the system. Today we have Aadhar card and all those things for that. But uh similarly if I say that if you don't have a Facebook account, if you don't have a WhatsApp account, you really don't exist, especially in today's younger generation. Uh so we I do have all those accounts including the Twitter account, where so you can also and I keep on posting stuff related to waste management there.
[7:08]So those things are also available now. So that's uh kind of a little bit background about myself and since it's a online class, I cannot have a personal one-to-one introduction of you, but I would like to see your introduction in the discussion forum so that uh we know each other well. And uh that's that will help me to deliver the course class better. So in terms of this big picture, solid and hazardous waste management, what is the what what we are talking about? We are talking about is waste that is being produced. Waste produced since time, like as soon as the humans started inhibiting this earth and started producing fire and started cooking and uh producing some utensils, producing some uh uh tools for fighting, we started there was there was a portion of that material that was used to make these. There was a portion which went on waste, because you cannot, when you are when you cut when you chop off, then you have lot of things which is produced as a waste. Initially, most of these was organic in nature. They were things, not only organic in nature, they were things which was coming directly from nature as well. So, it's it can be easily biodegraded. It can there was no heavy metals to worry about, we had we had not learned how to mine for heavy metals. We had not learned how to do the metallurgy and we were not using lots of electronic gadgets and all those fancy chemicals which have been manufactured now. So there is a concept called anthropogenic chemical and as well as what is known as the geogenic chemical. Geogenic is which is already there in the is there. So you are not really producing that. So something something like a which is Mother Nature is producing, Mother Nature has a mechanism to deal with that. If you look at the waste uh in in for the things for a bacterial world or microbiological world, waste from one species becomes the food for another species and the cycle continues and there is a recycling composting all those things happening in nature. But as we have made lot of industrial revolution, we have been producing more and more of these products. We are after usage of the product or even even during the manufacturing of this product, we are dumping lots and lots of waste which has certain chemicals there, which Mother Nature is not able to handle it. So we need to help the Mother Nature. The whole aspect of this waste management is so that we need to help Mother Nature so that we can treat this waste material before we are dumping it back into the environment, so that it does not cause uh health problem, does not cause environmental issues. Ultimately the whole aspect is human health and environment, to prevent human health and environment we have to do that. So, in terms of uh so I've been talking about, so it helps save uh so we have four basic means of dealing with waste. The dumping of waste has been there, everywhere humans have existed. Usually it is done in low lying areas. The burning of waste used to be often uncontrolled, nowadays we have a controlled incineration which reduces the smell and pestilence. So that's burning for energy recovery. Then recycling, where we recover beneficial components after separation for hazardous waste and waste minimization where we reduce the resource and energy usage during manufacturing. So all these things we'll explain in a little bit more detail in later on slides. So that's uh in terms of the big picture, this is how the solid waste uh solid and hazardous waste management is looked at.
[11:15]So before we go into the more detail, we'll talk a little bit about the history of the solid waste and I tell that in each and every class that I teach.
[11:32]It's very important to know why this course. That's like if you understand what is the need of this course, why this course, that's kind of keeps you motivated to learn about this course. So let's look at the history of solid waste. As I said earlier, as soon as the humans started producing things, uh we started producing waste. And uh so and then we had the we have been dumping this waste in wherever we could find a space. As the population increased and the cities and towns grew, this the dumping space keeps on going outside of the outside of the city boundary. Usually between the two city boundaries you will have the dump sites. And but when you take it outside of the construction city boundary, you have to transport it. So the transportation of the garbage becomes important. Today collection and transportation of the garbage is actually the number one in terms of the cost factor. The cost of transporting and disposing the garbage is very very high. collection and transporting the garbage is very very high. So we always try to minimize. And then that the collection and transportation of waste is similar, it's the same problem as as your transportation of goods, which is sold by Amazon or Flipkart and all those different Snapdeal and all those different companies.
[13:30]So it's the same logistics, same sort of linear programming, same sort of routing problem. So if you have a uh if you want to uh like do some work in waste management area in terms and if your expertise lies in those like a linear programming, operation research and uh optimization of route, you can apply that because that's actually uh it's uh it's there are softwares out there. Of course there is always you need to refine that software and things does get site specific as well because of the geometry of the city, the layout of the streets in the city. Then based on that you need to decide what should be your route for collecting of the garbage and if you can help reduce even one truck for a city like Delhi. One garbage good quality garbage truck is almost 200 to 250,000 US dollars. So if you can help in remove reducing by with coming up with a better route, better optimization, if you can help in reducing even one truck, that helps in reduction of cost of almost 200,000 US dollars. That would be you can hire several main powers to do a lot of other things for that or you can do something else. So uncontrolled dumping has been going on for the many many societies for the century as that in terms of the history of the solid waste. There have been cases where people have got sick. We have been cases where people have got sick and this Bubonic plague is one big example, where people have uh this was a disease caused by certain uh like a bacteria and microorganisms, it then got transferred between small rodents and their fleas, transmitted to humans as well.
[15:06]And in 14th century, it killed 50% of the population of Europe, which is 75 million. 75 million is around in terms of Indian, it's around 7.5 crore. So that's if you can add up Delhi, Bombay, uh and maybe Kolkata and Chennai have something around that. And that would be around at least three metros. So three metros of the population uh was was the population of Europe in 14th century. So pop there is a population explosion, not only in India, of course, there is other countries as well. And but so this population explosion we need we are producing more and more waste as well. So in the Middle Ages there was uncontrolled piles of garbage, uh uncontrolled piles of garbage that you see in in and around cities. So there is a uncontrolled piles of garbage showing up in and around cities and this uh they provided a great environment for rats and other disease carrying animals. So there are a lot of problem and other disease carrying animals to prosper, providing ideal conditions for a variety of disease to flourish, like leptospirosis, salmonellosis, toxoplasmosis, we don't have to worry about the name of those disease. But essentially, it's since telling us that waste improper management of waste was directly linked to the human health and of course the environmental health. So that's uh why this course is important. We have to learn about this course so that we can make sure our environment is safe and we are safe. So that's the bottom line. We have to learn about the course so that we can understand that uh how uh this the how to better manage the waste material. What what what what we can do in terms of uh proper management of the garbage. So when we manage the garbage properly, it helps in terms of uh preventing the environmental damage. Prevent and when we when we have the environmental damage, when we when we say environmental damage, what does it mean? We mean the damage to the air, damage to the soil, damage to the water. And in that uh in terms of uh those damages, it leads to if it water is damaged, that means my drinking water source is getting polluted. My drinking water source is getting polluted, our drinking water plants are not they are designed to treat certain things and if if we get contaminated water, I consume contaminated water either through my food intake or through my water intake, I will get sick. So that's uh it's linked right there. If the soil is contaminated, you will have the whatever is grown on the soil will have a chance of getting contaminated too. Most of the plants are are by nature a little bit of there is some phytoremediation, which is a term used to used for if you have a contaminated site, you grow certain plants and the plants actually uptake those contaminants into their biomass and then you can harvest that biomass and manage that waste that way, so that you can decontaminate those sites that way. That's the phytoremediation. So all the plants have a natural phytoremediating tendency, a bit. So that's uh even your letters or tomatoes and other things will have will does uptake little bit of these uh contaminants. And then we we consume that contaminants through our food intake. So that's that that problem is also there. So in terms of uh so that's the water, air, air, again, if the air is polluted, whatever we inhale, whatever we uh like uh breathe, that is polluted. So those those problems uh does uh so up. So that's uh like a it's uh so it's that's why uh the subject of this waste management becomes very important because it's linked to the environmental health and also links to the human health and they are all linked together which I was trying to explain it to you. So in terms of the waste management, we looked at historical what has been happening. So what is happening today? So we'll talk about that in this particular next part of uh whatever time is left in this particular module. So in terms of the present day, a big component of the waste management is three hours.
[19:27]Three R is very very common that you see. You may have also seen many of these places you see this recycling sign. So this recycling is basically you're trying to uh recycle the material and we'll talk about that a little bit detail as well. So big component of the waste management today is the three R. What is this three R? Reduce. You're trying to reduce the waste that is being produced at the first place and then reuse the waste and then recycle. So many times these days you see even four R, five R, they say reduce, reuse, recycle, recover. And there are some cases they also use five Rs. But the bottom line is try to reduce the bottom line is that amount of garbage going into the landfill, amount of is needs to be minimized. And there is another term used for that, that's called the diversion. When you look at European Union or the Canadian or the US uh solid waste management rules or solid waste management reports, uh city reports or the county reports or the state level report or even at the federal level report, they will tell you a term called diversion. Diversion means what fraction of the garbage was diverted away from the landfill. So that's what essentially it means. So diverted away from the landfill is considered a diversion, so which includes recycling, includes reduce reuse part. It also includes uh waste to energy part. It also includes composting, anaerobic digestion and everything together. So that's your uh part used for that. So in terms of reduce, what is the meaning of reduce, like you you reduce at the source, you produce less amount of garbage to start with. To make and then for that you make something smaller, you do some education and enforcement, you try to for example, one big example is you can reduce the amount of paper waste that is being produced by using both sides of the paper.
[21:50]In I I told you earlier that I have been in New Zealand and in the university that I was working in New Zealand, all the printers by default has been set in double sided printing.
[22:12]So they will do double sided printing unless you tell it to print single sided. So most of the time they will have double sided printing unless you tell it to single sometimes you may need single sided printing for some legal documents and other stuff, but most of the time you can work with double sided printing. So it's it's it's done similar things have been done on our Indian campuses. We we make a decision that all the paper all the printer that we'll buy has to be a double sided printer. And double sided printers are a bit expensive but if you look at the long term in terms of its impact, you like in terms of the reduction in the paper waste and uh not only paper that that leads to less amount of paper waste, that means management of paper waste goes down at the same time, even you're using double sided, you are also saving the amount of paper that you're using. So that you have a kind of leads to all that less number of trees to be fallen down and all those things associated with that. So that's the reduced part. Then the reuse part is that when you re you try to reuse the original material, uh use the material in the original form instead of throwing it away. So you didn't you don't throw that material away. You use it in a in its uh in its original form, rather than recreating it.
[23:43]For example, use of travel mug. Uh you can have a you use the travel mark for uh rather than buying your bottle water or you are trying to use uh like a use and throw uh like uh glasses.
[24:04]You you have your own travel mugs and then you use for your coffee and other stuff. You can use that. Many times it's difficult to do that, especially in today's marketing world. Uh I would say share with you one experience from one particular university campus where I was I was around.
[24:30]Uh there we we have been trying as part of the sustainability initiative of the campus. We have been trying we were trying to force this companies to actually give us a we can give us a permission to use this reusable travel marks, uh reuse this travel marks for filling up. So say if I want to after my lunch, I want to have a coke or a Pepsi or whatever drink, I can use my travel mug and fill it up.
[25:06]But the companies are not really keen on going that way because when you, they want you to carry that Coca-Cola cup or they want you to carry that Pepsi cup, for example. The Coca-Cola cup or the Pepsi cup when they carry it around and you're carrying it around, people see that, okay, he just had a Coca-Cola, people then some people say, okay, I'll go and get one too. So it's it's so the companies are actually forcing us to be a marketing doing a marketing for them or advertising for them. So if you have a reusable coffee mug or reusable travel mug, which you can use around the entire campus of say IIT Kharagpur. Uh then they may not like it because every time uh it's uh you there advertisements are gone.
[26:10]So I say if there is a dispenser, there are many places you will see where they will have dispensers now for coke, Pepsi and other stuff. And then you just take your travel mug, you fill it up. Whatever is the price you pay that. You don't pay for the cup. And if you don't pay for the cup at the that's kind of saves money for the company.
[26:36]But since they want to promote their product, they and in that case, if you're using a travel mug, nobody can distinguish whether you are using whether you are drinking coffee from that or whether you are drink Pepsi, coke, whatever. So it's all looks the same. It's a travel mug.
[27:01]So, that to to to that's why it's uncomfortable for those companies to do that. But uh those things are coming. Those things will come. Some come some campuses are actually forcing these companies that you have to do it, otherwise we'll not give you business to you. So that's that way the regulation will force uh companies to go that route. And then other thing is that you can have a yard sale. Yard sale basically you can throw you can uh sell your old stuff and uh and people do buy it. You can donate your old clothes, you donate your books and other stuff and that can be used by someone else. So that's the reuse part. Uh recycle part is where you divert part of the waste stream back into the production uh rather than throwing it away.
[28:09]So you are recycling that material back. So rather than throwing that material away, you're recycling it back and and using it that way. Uh recycling is done a lot. In Indian contest, uh we have most of the recycling at least uh kind of the process gets initiated by those Kabaddi walas, who come and collect those recyclables for your home.
[28:44]And that's where the process gets initiated and then that it's uh used for uh kind of goes from a smaller dealer to the bigger dealer and then ultimately it goes uh to recycling facilities. Some of these recycling is done in a very crude way, but some of the recycling is done in a more sophisticated way. For example, the plastics today, actually the number one buyer of recycled plastic is is Reliance company. And the number one buyer of recyclable paper is uh it's a ITC. And so recyclable plastic, they buy it, they produces new plastic out of that. They also produce polyesters out of that and that is used to make t-shirts and other stuff. That the fancy IPL T-shirts that you see people wearing around those nice shiny ones has a certain percentage of recycled plastic there. So it helps uh in the industry that way too. So that's uh that's the recycling part. So you're rather than throwing it away, you are using it in some some fashion. So this is how things are being managed today. And uh so to make all these discussion about the management part, there is a concept of life cycle analysis, which is getting very popular these days. This concept of life cycle analysis, which I talked about this course just if you have if you have taken that NPTL course, which was offered a semester ago, you know what I'm talking about. But for those of you who not or even for a recap of those who did, life cycle analysis is to has been suggested to solve this waste issue. And in terms of assessing the environmental impact of all stages of products life cycle. So from cradle to grave. Cradle means when the baby is born. Grave means when the person is died and has to be put into a for a burial. So since the concept came from the Western world, we are talking about cradle to grave. Uh in today's scenario, actually, we also talk about cradle to cradle. Cradle to cradle is where we're talking about, like you are doing a circular economy. You're recovering the material and you are putting it back into the into uh this process chain. So that's your cradle to cradle. I many times I joke around saying that uh it looks like the the whole world is started believing in Hinduism because we talk about reincarnation. So cradle to cradle is more like reincarnation of the material that is being used. So in the material cycle, uh material used, manufacture, product is made and then it goes into the disposal and uh rather than throwing it away, it recover the material and put it back to the production cycle.
[32:41]So that's the concept of circular economy as well. So that's where we have been using this concept of circular economy. So this cradle to cradle and that's the new concept, not cradle to grave anymore. But cradle to grave is what is the from the start to the finish. And as I as I was trying to talk to you, it avoid uh having a narrow outlook on environmental concern. It gives you a big picture uh of the system. So you don't really look at a narrow but that's what we have been doing. We have been come make different different compartments. What is known as the silos approach, rather than having a big picture approach, we have been doing silos. They can we're only looking at this particular aspect. Not worried about how this is impacting on this side and that side, only looking at a very narrow focus. That needs to go away. Mother Nature doesn't work in a like a multidisciplinary it sorry in a single disciplinary aspect. We need to kind of move away and go for a multidisciplinary approach to solve the problem of any problem including that for waste management. Waste management is a very highly multidisciplinary field as you will see as we make progress in this particular course. And this life cycle assessment approach is also part of resource conservation and recovery act, which was enacted in USCPA uh long back. So even uh around 20 years back they started thinking in terms of resource recovery. So that's why the act is not called waste management act. The one thing if you have watched if you have looked at carefully in terms of the USCPA United States Environmental Protection Agency, although they they are focused in terms of the waste Act, they call it Recra, RCRA.
[34:50]This Recra stands for it is uh R, C, R, A, where your resource conservation and recovery act. So it's although it's a waste management act, but we call it resource conservation and recovery act. So focus is on how to conserve the resource and how to recover the resource. And when you try to conserve and recover the resource, if you try to find out the what is the environmental footprint of that, your LCA exercise will help you to do that. So with with that, I would like to close this particular uh module, which is the first module. So again, welcome to this course and I really look forward to working with you for your over the next uh several uh next several weeks. So we'll and I hope you enjoy this course. Again, if you have any concern, if you need any help with anything, feel free to to put your question on the discussion forum. Why I suggest you can send emails as well, but I encourage you to use the discussion forum so that the answers on the discussion forum can be seen by other students. So that uh we we can uh other students can also benefit from whatever query has been raised. And then many times you may raise a certain question which can lead to certain good lively discussion and that's I will hope to have that. It will be really nice to have some real good discussion going on with arguments both back and forth, both for as well as against, so that to make things interesting. So I hope that you guys will make this course uh it's in your hand to make it interesting and I will try my best as well. So again, welcome to this course and this with this we'll we'll end the first module of this particular for the first week. Thank you.
