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recycling and disposal. Non-biodegradable waste in some
communities in Himachal Pradesh (Indian Himalayas) is collected
by waste pickers, who either sell it as raw material to recyclers
or reuse the waste themselves (Kuniyal, 2005a). In other areas in
the Himalayas, local governments advise the local population
to burn their rubbish in household rubbish pits (Allison, 2008).
The same study found that villagers dispose of items that they
cannot burn or are too big for garbage pits (such as household
appliances), by throwing them into ravines.
Rural mountain development projects
and waste side-effects
Development projects often fail to address predictable
changes in waste generation. For instance, the
provision of electricity to mountain communities is
often accompanied by an increase in waste that is often
difficult to safely dispose of. While bringing important
improvements – lighting without the need for indoor fires,
for example – these projects also create a need to manage
new kinds of waste such as small appliances and light
bulbs. An electrification project in Bhutan, for example,
provided electricity and lighting to highland communities.
However, the light tubes did not come with instructions
for disposal and there was no system of hazardous waste
management in place. As a result, people were exposed
to hazardous materials such as mercury (Allison, 2008).
dependent on local people and visitors (Kuniyal, 2005a). Similar
findings are reported in Nepal (Kuniyal, 2005b).
In more developed countries, mountain communities can also
be disproportionally underdeveloped and struggle with waste
management. In the Romanian Carpathians, for example, waste
is often dumped on flood plains (Mihai et al., 2012). Armenia
– a lower middle-income, mountainous country – has several
communities that are geographically separated from the main
urban areas, where the current approach to waste management
involves simple ‘truck and dump technology’. There is an absence
of both institutional capacity and technical parameters for SWM
and a lack of general awareness of waste management issues
within small and remote mountain communities (ADB, 2015).
A common problem in the disposal of waste in mountainous
regions is the difficulty in transporting waste from the point of
generation to landfills, and sorting and recycling facilities (Chen,
2010). In hilly terrain, roads meander along circuitous routes
to avoid steep gradients and impassable rock formations. This
increases the distance that waste vehicles must typically travel
to transport the waste to its destination. Furthermore, the
differences in elevation mean that vehicles must use more fuel to
cover a given distance (Asian Development Bank, 2013). Thus, the
costs associated with waste collection and disposal in mountain
regions can be significantly higher than in other areas.
In Nepal, the vehicles and equipment available for waste
collection and transport in each municipality varies widely and
can include rickshaws and carts for primary collection, tractors for
secondary collection or transport, and dump trucks for transport
to the disposal sites (Asian Development Bank, 2013). In some
of the most remote communities, there are simply no roads
(Kuniyal, 2005b). In remote mountain areas, transportation may
include the use of animals such as yaks, llamas, horses, donkeys
and mules (Worboys et al., 2015).
In contrast to urban areas, formal waste management sectors
often do not exist in smaller towns and more remote settlements
in the mountains. Generally, the volumes of waste generated in
these regions are much smaller than in larger urban areas and
tend to be dominated by organic waste. For instance, studies show
that in Nepal up to 70 per cent of municipal solid waste consists
of organic material (Pokhrel and Viraraghavan, 2005; Dangi et al.,
2011). The quantities of non-organic recyclable waste generated in
mountainous regions in the developing countries are too small to
make recycling an economically viable enterprise.
In the absence of formal waste management systems, there are
a variety of informal approaches to waste collection, sorting,
Rubbish bin in Nepal.
Photo
©
Björn Alfthan