Vimlendu's blog: Confronting a city's waste

NEW DELHI, India (CNN) -- Vimlendu Jha is the founder and head of Swechha -- We For Change Foundation which is based in India's capital, New Delhi.

Swechha started out as an organization to combat the pollution of the city's main waterway, the river Yamuna. Today it deals with the environmental issues that affect several aspects of Delhi.

Vimlendu leads volunteers and local children to key sites around the city to tackle the ecological problems, as well as to raise awareness of the issues. Follow his efforts in his blogs and video diaries.

September 12, 2007
It's been 4 years now since the first time I visited a landfill.

Every time I go, it invokes a different sense of emotion in me - disgust, frustration, apathy, anger. Sometimes the emotions are independent of each other, on other occasions I feel them all at the same time.

I still remember the day when I first ventured into Delhi's Gazipur Landfill, on my own, just to find out what lies behind the smell that I get every time I cross the nearby highway. The experience was all about scale; the scale of consumption, of waste and contamination.

Amid all this, worked hundreds of rag pickers for whom our waste has become their living. What an irony.

Since that day I have taken more than 20 groups on these landfill trips, with an average of five trips a year. I have seen it flooded in the rain, burning in the summer and the skyline filled with birds during the winter.

Last week, I accompanied a group of more than 50 students from grade eight (ages 13-14) of Vasant Valley School, one of the most progressive schools in Delhi, for a similar walk.

It was interesting, yet again, to find the traces of our own consumption lying littered all around the place -- the familiar and the unfamiliar.

The purpose of the journey was twofold. First, to make young people aware that mindless over-consumption leads to overproduction of waste, finally resulting in contamination of our land, water and air. Secondly, to understand that a landfill is an ecological disaster caused by gaps in our governance. It is also a void in our spirit of citizenship, which has prevented us from raising questions about the impact of such a landfill.

It's important to state a few facts here. Delhi, the capital of India, has 12 abandoned landfills and three landfills operating beyond their capacity. A Delhi government report in 2006 called them "almost full."

On paper each landfill claims to be a sanitary landfill but in my opinion, this is a sham. There is no lining at the base of the landfill, no segregation of garbage and "disposal" only means transporting it to that piece of land and leaving it to decay for millions of years.

This results in water contamination, as the chemicals released in the process of decomposition reach the water table. This is well documented. The air is filled with gases, including methane and heavy metals have been detected in the soil. Delhi produces an estimated 8,000 tons of waste every day.

The youngsters were quite moved by their visit to Gazipur. They have written a letter to the Chief Minister of Delhi to find out why she has been quiet about the landfill and if any measures are taken in planning of the new landfills. They also realize that each of them contribute to this damage and that they should minimize their waste and start living the formula -- reduce, reuse and recycle.

I hope we wake up soon before we find out that our footprints are a threat to our own survival. E-mail to a friend