Kathmandu’s waste management problem expected to increase this monsoon

The month of May has already been marked by a two-week-long garbage disposal obstruction in the Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC), but the worst is yet to come with more garbage being produced on the upcoming rainy days.

Several hundred tons of waste is produced by the Kathmandu Metropolitan City every day, most of which ends in the Sisdol Sanitary Landfill 18 kilometers away from the capital. Sisdol has been Kathmandu’s waste destination for the past 15 years even though it was constructed to accommodate waste for just two years. Due to the frequent strikes in the Sisdol Landfill site, the waste often gets dumped alongside the roads of Kathmandu city, causing foul smell and health hazards for the people living and having workplaces in those areas.

There is, by far, no formal recycling process conducted by the Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC), which is responsible for handling waste produced by the metropolitan city. The lack of recycling activities puts extreme stress on landfill sites. However, amidst KMC’S garbage problem, and failure from the government’s side to manage waste sustainably, social leaders and enterprises are taking the lead in building a sustainable waste management culture in Kathmandu through recycling waste items.

“A lot of resources can be gathered from what we throw away considering it to be ‘waste’ material, recycling and waste management are complementary to each other, they should go hand in hand,” says Pankaj Panjiyar, Chief Operation Officer at Doko Recyclers. “Nepal’s waste management problem has turned out to be a good entrepreneurship opportunity for us, but there is still a need to generate public awareness on the matter,” he adds. Doko Recyclers is a leading social enterprise that helps people in managing and recycle dry waste. It also works on generating public awareness on how people can recycle a lot of what goes into the public trash cans and later landfills.

Similarly, khaalisisi.com is an innovative digital platform that promotes ecological waste management by segregation of recyclable and reusable waste items at the source itself. It connects waste entrepreneurs and people wanting to sell or donate their recyclable waste, through its website providing convenient pick- up services at people’s doorsteps. It is currently mobilizing 13 thousand waste entrepreneurs in Kathmandu alone. “ Waste is one of the biggest problems that the world is facing right now, and the current practice is simply not enough and working,” says Aayushi K.C, CEO at khaalisisi.com.

“ khaalisisi works with the existing network of waste entrepreneurs, and also creates other waste entrepreneurs along the way with the vision to build Nepal as one of the top 20 recycling nations in the world by 2030,” concludes K.C.