Working With Municipalities And Our New Service Line

Parag Gupta
Founder, Waste Ventures

 Recent experience taught us a few things:

1.       The implementation of the project is more dependent on the individual project manager rather than the track record or reputation of the waste picker group.  With notable exceptions, there is little to no institutional knowledge or training provided in most waste picker groups leaving success up to the individual merit of the project manager.  With one waste picker group, though there was little direction provided by headquarters but the local manager was able to set up a high-performing system with the only hiccups stemming from coordination of financing from accountants at the head office.  We have also seen the opposite where a high performing organization did not translate to a newly positioned operation manager.

2.       Local understanding/ social capital is more important than waste management expertise – in fact, waste management expertise may get in the way of our ability to improve upon local systems as operators seem more inertial to learnings and shifting operations.  In more than a few occasions, we have gotten the impression that the “invitation to provide our expertise” is a euphemism for “shut up and bring in financing”.  In contrast,  the most captive audience we have are generally high performing organizations that have established successful programs with the local community in another sector and are now trying to broaden their municipal impact and are eager to learn municipal solid waste management.  (I remember in   

3.       Municipal/ government role should be minimized to providing capital equipment or land or even simple acquiescence to collect garbage.  In Osmanabad where we set up the first integrated solid waste management contract managed by waste pickers, we made the error of setting up a system that required operational payment from the municipality.  After three months of non-payment, the waste pickers were forced to stop work (after doing a great job cleaning the city) and we are now helping them litigate to procure back payment.

With this in mind, we’ve developed a household garbage collection service line that is a ‘feeder’ into municipal waste management.  We sell doorstep garbage collection to households directly and hire waste pickers to carry out the service – paying based on the number of households covered.  We then also purchase separated organic and recyclable waste, compost the organic waste to sell to farmers, and process recyclables to sell up the local value chain.

By doing so, we build our own supply of capable project managers that cut their teeth managing such projects (and capturing the learnings in the process), we hire local individuals with a track record of field experience but a strong pulse on the local community, and finally, we work directly with households.

Another key characteristic of the household service line is we learn quickly and cheaply by setting it up in phases that test feasibility as new activities are added and as it grows in scale.  If it reaches 10,000 households, we are then in a prime position (and good negotiating stance) to set up a municipal wide system. 

We’ve already been able to acquire some initial funds to set up our first household system only a couple weeks after launching and we hope to continue the momentum!