THE GOVERNMENT will soon announce amendments to the municipal solid waste management regulations, which will lay down effective and practicable guidelines and timeframes for waste reduction, Meena Gupta, secretary, Ministry of Environment and Forests, said.

 

Inaugurating the ‘FICCI Environment Conclave 2008’, Gupta said, “The government is engaged in revisiting the waste management regulations to look at suitable amendments. The rules have undergone the much-desired consultative process for formulating an effective approach through the various amendments being proposed where practical means and timeframes have been taken into account. The amendments would be announced soon.”

 

The secretary noted that in the case of hazardous waste management too, several round of consultations have been conducted and, we hope to bring about the desired changes with the objective of achieving practicable results and outcomes that the new rules will put in place.

 

Responding to the observations by Ashwin Shroff, chairman, Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) Environment Committee, Gupta commented that urban local bodies of the private sector needed to explore projects that could become eligible for CDM or carbon finance. “Today, there are only a handful of projects from the waste management sector under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM),” she said, adding that there was a huge untapped potential in the urban sector, where projects could not only be developed in waste management, but could also be bundled together with other municipal services that had an emission reduction potential.

 

She said that sustainable waste management could materialise only if service delivery was linked to private sector participation. “It is imperative that the private sector comes forward and enables the public sector stakeholders to devise appropriate frameworks that result in a win-win for both sides,” she said, adding that the private sector could also play an important role in building the capacities of municipal bodies. The municipalities, on their part, need to provide guidance for the selection of appropriate technologies.

 

The secretary said that recycling was an intrinsic aspect of a sound environmental programme and was completely private sector-driven. The government institutions, she said, could facilitate the process of identifying technical and institutional benchmarks for recyclers that could, in turn, ensure that the right players come on board for efficient and effective service delivery.