How Project Amhi’s Safai Saathis collect and segregate garbage in Alibaug

Alibaug Our own Hamptons if your pincode halts at 400018 The wide expanse of the silver sands at Kashid beach And here the bank of trash the high tide washed in rubber footwear thermocol packets of chips and a kurta Project Amhirsquos Safai Saathis will pick up all of this in the course of the day take it to the 10guntha plot loaned to them by the panchayat and sort the waste into 11 categories Each burlap sack or goni will then be sent to a respective recycling centre as far away as Khopoli or PalgharIn the absence of this citizen endeavourmdashmostly by Mumbai residents with second homes by the seasidemdashthis garbage would be collected and dumped in adhoc landfills which is any dent in the ground between villages or burned at the side of the road risking wildfires and assuring air pollutionProject Amhi began its guerilla garbage collection tactics in 2021 when Rosalind Pereira and her family moved to their home in Nandgaon to sit out the pandemic like many Mumbaikars Then she noticed the plumes of fumes on the seafront her patio overlooks Waste would just be swept into a mound and litNineteen women earn Rs 300 daily to clean up 10 villages every dayldquoWe first started collecting garbage in Nandgaon and then moved on to Kashid in six monthsrdquo says the cofounder She was soon joined by Hansu Pardiwala within a few months who has a background in waste management and Kiran Patel another conscientious residentThe challenge is to get people to segregate the waste into wet and dry at source Ironically it was enforcement of this step in Navi Mumbai that won the satellite city the badge of being the third cleanest city in the country The Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation NMMC refused to collect garbage if it was not segregatedBy 2023 the model has developed to cover 19 Safai Saathismdashall womenmdashcollecting garbage and sorting it at the above centre They cover 10 villages every daymdashfrom Vihur to Korlai up until the Revdanda bridge Two supervisors Naina Thakar and Sameer More oversee the operations and maintain data about the garbage collectedmdashtwo tonnes of compressed clothes over the last five months two to three tonnes of rubber footwear transported to a recycling centre in Pune at a cost of Rs 13500 where they will sell for R4 per kilo bringing in about R9000 At the centre the shoersquos sole is separated from the upper and the former is turned into a foam material while the nylon is recycled into another raw material Plastic is melted and turned into nonfood grade items such as trash binsSafai Saathis collect and segregate the waste into 11 categories and send them to respective centres for upcycling or recyclingldquoWe reached out to women through selfhelp groups that would meet in the evening because women are tasked with home managementrdquo says Pereira who runs the handmade craft jewellery brand Maya Bazaar Getting them on board was simple ldquoWe offer regular and timely pay sanitation equipment regular hours and respectrdquo says Pereira ldquoand we do the job we expect them to dordquo For the training sessions on segregation Pereira and some neighbours put on their gloves emptied the burlap sacks and extracted the dry waste from the wet The women earn R300 for a dayrsquos work There has been a conscious decision to divide the cost among the residents and not rely on donations since fundraising then becomes a dedicated job with a person on the payrollPet and glass bottles are the coveted treasures of the burlap sackmdashraddiwaalas rush to collect them as they sell at Rs 20 per kilo Lowdensity polyethylene LDPE like plastic packets in comparison draws only Rs 2 per kilo Multilayered plastic MLP which keeps potato chips crunchy and bhujia brittle is the hardest to recyclemdashit has to be sent all the way to Khopoli where it is turned into pellets In the past few months four to five tones of MLP and LDPE have been sent to Palghar at a transportation cost of Rs 15000In the winter vacation of December 2022 to January 2023 Cathedral and John Connon and School student Maira Gracias sifted through the garbage in an attempt to see what most made up the LDPE and MLP waste ldquoRosalind is a family friend and I wanted to help with the work she was doingrdquo says the 15yearold Parel resident ldquoI took home a 66 kilo bag sifted out the food packets cleaned them and then segregated them by manufacturing company and weighed themrdquo Her findings took the form of an Excel sheet that documented how many packets belonged to each firm their weight as unrecycled garbage and the MRPs of the food stuff It took her about a monthRosalind Pereira cofounded Project Amhi along with Kiran Patel and Hansu Pardiwala in 2021Right now thrust is on education and citizen endeavour Many households in Nandgaon contribute Rs 1250 per month that sustains Project Amhirsquos work The gap Project Amhi and the Zilla Parishad are trying to fill is to educate stall owners on Kashid beach the resorts and homestays to segregate their waste A ghanta gaadi acquired in June with separate sections for dry and wet is one step towards this hope The other is educating children in schools by looking closely at their dumping station ldquoWe gave the children biscuits to eat and then quizzed them on where they would put the wrapperrdquo says PereiraThe Safai Saathis have also been educating the stall owners on Kashi beach on how to separate their waste to put it into the ghanta gaadiThe other hope is to hold manufacturing companies accountablemdashsuch as PepsiCo and Haldiram whose wares contribute most to the MLP waste as per data collected by Graciasmdashin helping out with transportation of the waste to the recycling centres An element of enforcement or penalisation is also being considered by authoritiesOne idea being floated is to bring back onsite composting of wet waste in homes and at resortsmdasha practice most villagers may remembermdashso that only dry waste makes it to the garbage bin and then is easy to segregate With infrastructure still in nascent stages in the area and with the density of population being relatively low Project Amhi hopes they can set down a system that will support the growth of the clusterldquoYou segregate we will acceptrdquo says Periera ldquoEveryone is a stakeholder in a clean environment but waste seems to always becomes someone elsersquos problemrdquo