Let’s Transform: Improving lives and building waste management businesses in India

Improving Lives and Building Waste Management Businesses in India

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India’s five million sanitation workers often work in hazardous conditions, where fatalities are a matter of course — India estimated that between 2018 and 2019, at least one sanitation worker succumbed to the unsafe and unsanitary conditions every five days.

The Alliance is working with Saahas Waste Management Private Limited (SWPL) to help bring informal waste workers in four Indian cities into the formal economy, while maximising the recovery of low-value flexible plastic waste. SWPL is an enterprise that provides end-to-end waste management services and works for environmental and social change based on the principles of a circular economy.

The Let’s Transform initiative aims to build ethical supply chains while diverting low value plastics from landfills and water bodies. As part of the initiative, support by way of training and upskilling was provided to a group of informal waste managers to facilitate their journey to become self-sustaining microentrepreneurs.

The project, which began in April 2022, entered its second phase in May 2023. Both phases have focused on social inclusion for the informal waste sector, including waste aggregators and scrap dealers. These workers are extremely significant in the handling of India’s domestic waste. Together, the informal waste community and its value chain manages more than 90% of the country’s waste, estimated at 63 million tonnes a year, a number projected to grow to 3.4 billion tonnes per year by 2050 unless managed sustainably.

Across the two phases, the project has worked with five micro-entrepreneurs in Bengaluru, Delhi, Kochi, Pandhurna, and Coimbatore. They received financial and managerial support to formalise their businesses and enable them to move towards sustainability, while also ensuring cleaner and safer working conditions for the informal waste value chain workers.

These workers, in turn, help to maximise the recovery of low value plastics including flexible films and packaging, diverting these from landfills and water bodies, to be sent for co-processing in cement kilns or to recyclers. The project has also provided the micro-entrepreneurs with training in bookkeeping, on health and safety, labour laws, and responsible waste management practices.

In phase II, which ended in early 2024, the project team helped the micro-entrepreneurs to add value to the sourced waste and divert a portion of it towards recycling.

To provide transparency and access to data across the value chain, Saahas developed TRACER, a digital traceability tool that tracks the end-to-end movement of plastic waste. They are now working with micro-entrepreneurs to enable the use of the tool in their operations.

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