Our project targets the current waste production and disposal system in three key areas: raising awareness at the household level, improving methods of waste collection, and sorting waste and streaming waste into different utilization and/or treatments. One of the main problems in the home is that trash cans are unlabeled and people do not sort their waste, causing cross-contamination between garb
age types and rendering papers and plastics non-recyclable. Instead of targeting homes individually, we will improve home sorting by working through the educational system with schools (grades K-10) and college (grades 11-12). Most households have at least one member in the school system. By creating a small series of waste-awareness activities workshops and working with school administration to implement the program in existing science classes, we hope to teach students the benefit of sorting household waste and the impact on the environment if spread around outside. Next, we must improve the efficacy of the waste collection system. Currently, the system consists of workers collecting roadside in either flatbed trucks or pedal-powered vehicles waste and dumping it outside of the city. In two of the twelve wards in Dinajpur, the workers collect waste door-to-door, but the system is losing momentum due to lack of organization. We will reduce the amount of roadside waste and streamline the collecting process by setting up large, compartmentalized garbage collection containers at regular intervals in the city where people from households can throw their newly sorted trash. The municipality waste collection vehicles will then only need to travel from container to container to collect the waste and transport it to a temporary waste storage facility. However, the vehicles currently have no individual compartments, meaning that even if households sort their trash, the waste will remix in the collecting bed. To remedy this, we will manufacture and provide simple dividing units, made of either wood or plastic, that can clip into the vehicle bed and create compartments for the different kinds of trash (paper, plastic, organic, and residual). Finally, we address the ultimate fate of the garbage collected by connecting the waste system and its workers to private companies. In a pre-project survey, some households reported that they sold their paper waste to a private company that reuses the paper for wrapping and packaging. The local government can utilize the same system for collected paper waste, selling to this company and generating a small profit. Dinajpur has considerable amounts of surrounding farms that buy their fertilizer from a chemical fertilizer plant in the city; we will work with the business and the municipality to sell the collected organic waste to the company for conversion to fertilizer, which the chemical company will ultimately sell to farmers. The residual trash, now significantly reduced in volume, will continue to go to the dumps outside of the city.
