Kathmandu’s streets are frequently lined with garbage—bulging blue and pink bags of household waste. When trash isn’t collected for some reason, it ends up on the road. People hurl it out of car windows on their way to work or while out on evening walks. A small pile will steadily grow till the entire place looks like a dumping site. The city doesn’t have a proper waste management system. But what it also lacks is collective conscience. We don’t want our homes to stink so we make the city dirty. We disregard the fact that someone will eventually have to clean it all up. 

Naresh Majhi, a trash collector, says picking heaps of garbage from the streets is both risky and degrading. There’s a lot of rotten stuff there, which is made only heavier and filthier by the incessant rains. “People pass by with their hands over their noses but we are compelled to stay there for hours at a stretch. Most of us fall sick or have severe nausea and vomiting,” he says. 

Sabin Khatri, another trash collector, says there are animal carcasses and medical waste too in the garbage heaps. He says it’s upsetting and, at the end of the day when they finally get to go home, always after 10 pm and sometimes at midnight, they feel bad for themselves. “People’s thoughtlessness only adds to the indignity of our work,” says Khatri.  

Majhi requests people not to toss garbage on the road when he catches them in the act. But most of them get annoyed and say they don’t want trash lying around in their homes. Majhi says he realizes why people are angry. After all, they pay private companies like the one he works for a monthly fee to collect their trash. But he wishes they would understand that sometimes things are beyond the control of these companies. 

In times like these, the public too needs to play a role in managing their trash and not expect the government and those in waste management to shoulder all the burden. The problem, he believes, is that people don’t segregate their trash. If they could separate the dry from the wet then trash would be manageable as it wouldn’t decay and stink. That way, he says, people would be more likely to keep it hidden away in some corner of their homes for longer.

Kiran Shrestha of Action Waste Pvt. Ltd. says throwing trash on the road where it will collect and decompose, giving off a bad stench and becoming a breeding ground for flies, will lead to health problems in the workers as well as the nearby residents. Trash will leach into soil and water and contaminate food. Worse, the smell lingers long after the area has been cleaned up. Every day when garbage collectors go to clean up the streets they come back with injuries—cuts from broken glasses and scrapes and pricks from other carelessly disposed sharp objects like needles. Almost all of them have headaches or digestive issues. 

Dhurba Acharya of Solid Waste Management Association of Nepal says it’s not that people aren’t aware of the repercussions of their actions. But they don’t care. He says like other times this time around too when protests at Nuwakot cut off the city’s access to Sisdol, people were made aware of the problem through newspapers and online portals and even miking. They were asked to keep their trash at home and not throw them on the road -- or riverside. But only a handful listened. “Most people think the trash they generate is not their problem. This attitude makes Kathmandu’s waste management immensely challenging,” he says.

When collection resumed recently, following the newly-elected mayor Balendra Shah’s negotiations at Sisdol and Banchare Danda, the Kathmandu Metropolitan City started cleaning up the streets. But small piles were gathering the very next day in the swept-up places. Acharya says people throw more trash in places where garbage had previously been collected. They feel it will be a few weeks more before collection vehicles will come to their homes. “But they think it’s okay to pollute the streets because it’s being cleaned up anyway, which is why we are urging the government to start collection from homes. That way clearing roads won’t be an endless cycle,” he says.

We complain about private companies not collecting trash regularly. We blame the government for not effectively managing waste. But we don’t think of our own actions. Acharya says composting kitchen waste can reduce trash volume by 60 to 70 percent. And we don’t even need a large space for it; a bucket or simple ceramic planter will do. 

“Many people argue that they live in single rooms and don’t have the space for two large bins. We did a survey and found one house in the city has up to 32 families,” he says. In places like these, the local authorities can step in and arrange for a communal composting pit or spot, he adds.

Laxmi Ghimire of Nepsemyak Sewa Pvt. Ltd. says all it takes is two separate vessels for trash in the kitchen: One for dry waste like paper and plastic, and another for kitchen scraps like vegetable peels and such. Ghimire says that Nepsemyak collects garbage from around 175,000 kitchens. Out of this, 25,000 segregate their waste. They have plans to take that number to 40,000 by the end of this year. “We have to focus on segregation at the source. That is the only way to effectively manage waste in Kathmandu,” says Ghimire. 

Shrestha of Action Waste adds that many people don’t like to pay garbage collection companies and choose to dispose of their waste themselves. That usually means throwing it in some corner of the road, a little distance from where they live. “It’s more a problem of the mindset than resources,” he says. Shrestha feels the government must impose strict measures like heavy fines and community service on those who litter public places. Coercion is the only way, he says, “reasoning and requests have never worked.”

Agreeing with him, Sita Bhujel, a resident of Ratopul, Kathmandu, thinks people must be forced to be responsible for the trash they generate. It can be done with proper planning, incentives, and provision of punishments. Bhujel lives in a one-bedroom apartment. She makes sure waste is packaged in large bags and kept in a nearby open field, whenever there is a strike of some sort and garbage isn’t collected. But she says many people in her neighborhood toss leaky bags of trash under the bridge at nighttime. 

Bhujel says it is the thoughts of people like her who will have to do the dirty work that makes her mindful of her waste habits. “I don’t want my actions to hurt or demean someone else,” she says.