Managing Urban Waste for Cleaner Oceans

The Urban Ocean programme is a partnership of The Circulate Initiative, Resilient Cities Network and Ocean Conservancy. The programme helps cities identify gaps and vulnerabilities in their solid waste management system leading to plastic leakage into the environment, specifically into the waterbodies and oceans. It also helps cities to develop holistic solutions to address these gaps. Can Tho, Panama City, Semarang, Pune, and Chennai are some of the member cities of the Urban Ocean program. Okapi is working with Chennai Resilience Centre to implement the Urban Ocean program in Chennai. Using principles of circular economy and focusing on plastics, the program is being implemented across phases.

Phase I involved gap assessment using a methodology called the ‘the circular assessment protocol’ or CAP, developed in the Circularity Informatics Lab (CIL) at the University of Georgia. This methodology helped the team to explore the extent to which production, use, disposal/reuse of waste material follows a closed loop with minimal leakage whilst also understanding economics, politics and governance of Chennai city’s waste management system. The research findings from this assessment can be read in the Chennai’s Circularity Assessment Protocol Report.

Phase II involved using the extensive research conducted in Phase I to design practical and fundable solutions for addressing a city’s waste management challenges. These solutions and policy recommendations have been developed in a collaborative manner, following several rounds of interviews and workshops with key stakeholders from the local and state government, academia, formal and informal waste collectors and aggregators, resident welfare associations and popular brands like Pepsi Co, P&G and ITC. These solutions and policy recommendations have been described in detail in the Chennai Project Statement.

The team is continuing to work towards implementing some of these solutions. Two pilot projects have been conceived – One is an area-based initiative to demonstrate how we may build a near zero waste neighbourhood in collaboration with the Greater Chennai Corporation, Urbaser Sumeet, and ROKA, the residential welfare association in Kasturba Nagar, Adyar. While the second pilot focuses on Chennai’s valuable waterbodies and on strengthening the current system to trap waste using trash booms in the rivers and possibly lakes and canals as well.