Mountain Waste Management Solutions

Written by Caroline / 15 February 2010 / Read Caroline's latest blog entries.

During the late summer of 2009, two expeditions took me north into India, once to Himachal Pradesh to visit Spiti Valley travelling through the Rohtang Pass, "the end of the inhabitable world", and once to the famous Valley of the Flowers in Uttarakhand. In both places, I met creative and passionate individuals committed to changing the waste cycle - which otherwise sends loads of plastic waste from urban centers to meet tourist demands for bottled water and packaged foods up in the mountains, where it is left as an unfortunate legacy of the tourist recognition of the beauty and sacredness of the mountains.

I visited the Manali recycling center, and saw their waste compression unit. Waste is compressed into lower volume, higher density blocks which can be brought down to major cities to be recycled. In other areas, communities are attempting to manage waste in their own way.

On my way to the Valley of the Flowers, I met a woman committed to converting a dump site into a compost heap, and spent several hours with her cleaning out the site of garbage to prepare the area for its new life!

In Spiti Valley, Ecosphere has run campaigns to turn plastic bottles into solar water heaters, make newspaper bags, and weave chip packages into new materials. Incidentally, Ecosphere's work on green buildings and more efficient greenhouses is worth a blog of its own!

Plastic bags were banned months ago in Himachal Pradesh, and now all products are sold in either recycled bags, cloth bags or newspaper bags. This image shows the Minister of the Environment for Manali, with one of the bags they distributed. I'm working to post his video we took during the interview we shared as well!