Economic, Social and Environmental Implications of Urban Solid Waste and Need for Valorization of Waste

“Source reduction is, on the face of it, perhaps the most appealing of all the possible approaches to solid-waste management” - William Rathje and Cullen Murphy Waste poses a threat to public health and environment and hence it should be properly collected and disposed. Managing municipal solid waste is a pervasive problem for any urban area and the Singara Chennai is no exception to it. Admitting that it is one of the best managed city, but still problem of dealing with solid waste generated in the ever expanding Chennai city is an uphill task. The materialistic world has been sustaining, so to say, by transforming natural resources into garbage. This is an unnatural behavior because mother nature does not throw stuff away – dead trees, birds, beetles and for that any natural material including human being are pretty quickly recycled by the earth system. Our perception of waste as an unwanted material with no intrinsic value has to change because of the fact that the waste generated is a resource with transformed material. Hence, to extract value from this science, technology and attitudinal changes are the need of the hour for converting the ever increasing waste into wealth. For a long time our economy has been linear but there is a positive shift to the circular economy which has changed the way we look at the urban solid waste which no longer remains a waste but is a resource now. The paper deals with the environmental and health implications of the urban solid waste and its impact on society if a timely intervention to make it a part of circular economy is not attempted seriously. The paper brings out the economic, social and environmental benefits of treating solid waste as a resource.