The world over, we produce a huge quantity of garbage daily, with any major city in India (Mumbai, Delhi, etc) producing about 6,000 tons of garbage each day. In spite of efforts by environmentalists, the quantity is increasing by the day. Unfortunately, this would mean more garbage to dispose of when the goal should be less.

Any city's garbage problem has three faces. It is an economic problem, an environmental challenge, and a potential health hazard. With the cost of the land in the cities getting exorbitantly expensively the city authorities are hauling garbage to distant landfill sites some of the sites hundred of miles away. But this long-distance hauling is creating a new problem with the hauling trucks impeding traffic, polluting the air, raising carbon emissions, noise, increasing the cost of the road maintenance, spillage while enroute and the inevitable increase in the cost of disposal, so finally further constraints on the city’s budget.

With the present rate of garbage generation the option of using landfill is at best a short term measure - As landfills begin to fill up, the city garbage will have to travel even longer distance and there will be progressively fewer sites to take this garbage, pushing disposal costs even higher. Most importantly land filling garbage uses land. For every 40,000 tons of garbage added to a landfill at least one acre of land is lost to future use. A large surrounding area is also lost as the landfill with its potentially toxic wastes must be isolated from residential areas.

Incineration is another solution to the garbage mess that is short term, burning 10,000 tons of garbage each day will only add to air pollution, making already unhealthy city air even worse. Like hauling the garbage to distant sites, incineration treats the symptoms, not the causes of garbage problem – the rapidly increasing garbage generation.

The amount of garbage produced in a city is a manifestation of a more fundamental problem - the evolution of a global throwaway economy. The challenge we now face is to replace the throwaway economy with a reduce/ reuse/ recycle economy. The challenge is not so much what to do with the garbage as it is how to avoid producing it in the first place. Throwaway products, facilitated by the appeal to convenience and the artificially low cost of energy, account for much of the garbage we produce. Just to list a few - facial tissues substituted for handkerchiefs, disposable paper towels for hand towels, disposable table napkins for cloth napkins, throwaway beverage containers for refillable ones and the canvas shopping bag for shopping bags that, are used to carry home throwaway products, are themselves designed to be discarded, becoming part of the garbage flow.

Reusing of beverage containers not only reduces the garbage generation, further the refillable containers are simply back-hauled to the original soft drink or brewery bottling sites by the same trucks that deliver the beverages, they reduce not only garbage but also traffic congestion, energy use, and air pollution.

After we control the generation of garbage by reducing & reusing, then we can reduce the garbage further by recycling. We have the technologies to recycle virtually all the components of garbage. For example, paper from recycled fibre, further on so with glass, aluminium, plastic, etc. The nutrients in garbage can also be recycled by composting organic materials, including yard waste, table waste, and produce waste from supermarkets. Each year, the world mines about a hundred million tons of phosphate rock and thirty million tons of potash to obtain the phosphorus and potassium needed to replace the nutrients that crops remove from the soil. Urban composting that would return nutrients to the land could greatly reduce this expenditure on nutrients and the disruption caused by their mining.

Yet another garbage-reducing step in this fiscally stressed situation would be to impose a tax on all throwaway products, in effect a landfill tax, so that those who use throwaway products would directly bear the cost of disposing of them. This would increase government revenues which can be used for implementing green measures.

The earth can no longer tolerate the pollution, the energy use, the disruption from mining, and the deforestation that the throwaway economy requires. There are numerous solutions that are economically attractive, and environmentally desirable. A response to this situation that treats the causes rather than the symptoms of garbage generation could work wonders for any city.