Waste never goes away. It is a continual and ubiquitous problem. The sanitation workers kept on telling me during the course of my research, “We clean a street in the morning and by the afternoon, it is dirty again”. In other words, it never ends.

Asif, a sanitation worker who has recently been employed after losing his job with the Pakistan Telecommunication Company Ltd after its privatisation, points out to me the never-ending presence of waste in public spaces. His discreet complaint also hints at ineffectiveness of the institutions deal with the waste.

The Lahore Waste Management Company (LWMC) is the main institution managing the municipal solid waste. Municipal solid waste comes many forms, biodegradable, garden, construction, or animal. This list does not include waste that is taken away by a water-based sewerage system which falls in the jurisdiction of the Water and Sanitation Agency (Wasa). These categories of waste and the institutions that deal with it are not mutually exclusives. So collecting, transporting, and disposing of waste requires an integrated system, the base of which is the sanitation workforce.

The LWMC’s sanitation workforce collects waste from the nine towns that make up the City District Government of Lahore (CDGL). Each union council in these towns has a staff of sanitation workers and supervisors. Sanitation workers collect waste (either by sweeping public spaces or taking it directly from private spaces) and deposit it into containers. Compactors or loader trucks collect waste from containers and take it to the dumping site at Mehmood Booti.

A visit to the dumping site, on a visceral level, will make anyone conscious of the waste problem in Lahore. The site consists of cascading hills of waste, with birds circling overhead. In distant hills, where waste has been accumulating for the past twenty years, waste has faded into grayish brown. As I stand at the end of one mound, waste being dumped causes older waste to be pushed off the side.

Collecting and transporting waste to the peripheries of Lahore is not environmentally sustainable. That’s why the LWMC launched a project at Lakhodair to dispose of waste in a more environment friendly way, having proper storage facilities, providing fuel for cement and energy production.

While some progress has been made, one way of dealing with waste problem is recycling. An extensive and well-developed network already exists to deal with recycling but it’s just on an informal basis, with considerable money being exchanged. Numerous waste collectors, including Afghanis, collect recyclable material from waste containers, and sell it to junkyards at different rates to be forwarded to plastic factories on the Band Rd and in Shahdara.

Despite all institutions and networks, the waste problem never goes away, raising many questions. A researcher on urban issues once said that as countries develop, more waste is produced. The casual mention of ‘development’ could make one raise eyebrows there is truth in this statement.

Historically, Pakistan’s economy has been shaped by capitalist development where consumption is a major and perpetual form of economic and social activity. This is a major reason why waste is a continual and ubiquitous problem: the end product of every act of consumption is waste. Because consumption and waste go hand in hand, we now have a vast system, consisting of formal institutions and informal networks, to deal with this waste problem that does not seem to be going away anytime soon.

Published in Dawn, August 31th, 2014