It took the Great Flood of 28 September for the residents of Kathmandu to finally realise how much trash they were throwing into the Valley’s sacred rivers.
Even three weeks later, plastic bags wave like flags high up on the branches of trees at Teku and Sankhamul, reminding us of just how high the water level rose on that fateful day. There are pieces of cloth, styrofoam, plastic bottles and other garbage still strewn along the ruins of pavements and embankments.
This was the revenge of the rivers. The Bagmati, Vishnumati, Manohara, Nakkhu were getting back at city dwellers for treating the once sacred rivers as dumpsites. The rivers threw the trash right back where it came from.
"If we do not want such garbage being washed away during the monsoon, we should prioritise waste management. We should focus on every aspect of waste generation," says Shilashila Acharya of Avni Ventures, a recycling company in Kathmandu. “Dumping sites are often near the riversides. So, we might also want to rethink the locations of the dumping sites.”
Single-use plastic is the biggest source of trash in Kathmandu Valley which uses up an estimated 5,000,000 plastic bags a day. About 800 tons of this non-biodegradable material is dumped in the river, or in landfill sites every day.
The thicker plastic of bottles and other discarded household items are collected by waste pickers for recycling, but plastic below 20 microns in thickness is thrown away after being used once to carry vegetables or other food purchases. One plastic bag takes 500 years to completely biodegrade, and microplastics contaminate drinking water and find its way into the human food chain.
Plastics thrown haphazardly into rivers can clog up drainage channels, harm the water cycle and poison aquatic species and wildlife. Waste collecting companies have realised that there is money in trash, and are doing good business recycling the plastic, but since thin plastic bags are not recycled it ends up being swept down the Bagmati to the plains.
“Cleaning campaigns are not enough. When we clean, we pick up the waste from one site and throw it off in another likely a landfill. This does not deal with the main problem of waste,” says Nabin Maharjan of Blue Waste to Value which recycles waste and turns them into sellable products such as cooking utensils.
He adds: “But what we can do instead is pick the waste in a segregated form, reduce them to products and sell them. And that is how a circular economy can thrive. The government and local authorities should be involved.”
