Every day when an urban Indian, from a million plus population town, throws a banana peel, empty soft drink PET bottle, a used cardboard box or other waste into a dust bin, she adds 600 grams to the 15 million tons of waste generated annually. Interestingly, what is trash for an Indian spells a huge business opportunity for entrepreneurs. 

And the opportunity is Rs. 500 crore annually from trash collection alone. It becomes 12 times bigger, in fact Rs. 6128 crore annually, if you know what to make out of it. This has been revealed in the forthcoming issue of Dare, a magazine for entrepreneurs from the CyberMedia group.

As a part of the study, Dare spoke to experts in the field of waste management, NGOs and a handful of companies which have ventured into this sector. The team at Dare then arrived at estimates, based on a statistical model, of the revenue opportunity from this untapped and unorganized sector. 

More than half of this revenue potential, at Rs. 3,624 crore, comes from Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore and Kolkata. The remaining revenue opportunity comes from the 36 biggest cities in India with a population of 1 million and above. These cities included Ahmedabad, Baroda, Pune and Surat in the Western India; and Asansol, Patna and Jamshedpur in the East. From the North India it covered cities like Amritsar , Bhopal, Jaipur and Lucknow . Coimbatore, Cochin , Madurai and Vijaywada were included from the South 

Being unorganized the Indian waste management market is very small compared to the international standards. In the US the market for solid waste management was $ 46.5 billion in 2005. About 48% of the companies in the business were listed on a major stock exchange in the US.

Commenting on the study Krishna Kumar, Group Editor of Dare, a magazine dedicated to identifying new entrepreneurial business opportunities said, "In India, the market is yet to take shape, thanks to the government's apathy and our mindset on waste disposal. We need to take a page out of the experience of western countries and exploit the Rs. 6000 crore potential." 

Treasure in the Junkyard 
The waste management cycle involves collection, transportation, segregation, treatment and disposal of waste. The big bucks lie in what is made from the different components of the waste – organic, recyclable and inert – at each stage. 

There are many ways of managing waste including taking the waste to landfill sites, incineration, recycling and composting. 

Taking Delhi as a sample market, the study shows that collection of 6,000 tons of waste every day alone could rake in Rs. 365 crore a year. Out of the 6,000 tons, 60% is organic waste, 25% is recyclable material and 15% is inert. 

Making compost out of biodegradables and selling it in the open market is another Rs. 657 crore revenue opportunity. Selling recyclables could fetch in another Rs. 274 crore. This totals to Rs. 1,022 crore every year. 

Mumbai is a close second in waste generation at 5,800 tons per day followed by Kolkata at 4,000 tons, Bangalore at 2,800 tons, and Chennai at 2,675 tons, according to an Assocham study. 

The study extrapolated Delhi 's figure across different categories to 41 cities that have a population of a million plus and found that there Rs. 6,128 crore to be made every year from managing garbage. The benefits of a cleaner and a healthy environment are the biggest benefits of organized waste management, the Dare study says.

The Challenge
Currently waste management in India mostly means picking up waste from residential and industrial areas and dumping it at landfill sites. Waste collection is usually done on a contract basis. In Delhi three private companies – Delhi Waste Management, AG Enviro and Metro Waste – collect, transport and dump waste at landfill sites . But in most cities it is done by rag pickers, small-time contractors and municipalities. 

A nother method of waste management is by incineration. This involves conversion of waste into energy through burning. According to the Planning Commission, there is a potential of 2,700 MW of power generation from urban and industrial waste in the country. The eleventh five year plan even targets 400 MW of power generation from wastes. However, the study points out to several initiatives which have suffered due to red tapism. 

In the recycling method garbage is segregated into organic, inert and recyclable waste. Recyclable material, mostly PET bottles, cold drink cans, paper cartons and certain types of plastic products are sold to companies who recycle such products. 

However, unlike most western economies where segregation of waste is done at the household level and there are fines imposed for mixing organic and recyclable waste, in India a majority of people do not even know the difference between green and blue trash cans kept on road sides. So, manual segregation of waste has to be carried out. 

The study points out that the first step towards maximizing this opportunity is a change in mindset about doing business from waste. 

About Dare
"'Dare' cover the entire gamut of activities starting with the idea, funding, creating an organisation, marketing logistics, branding, growth and value realization, and environment policy and law. 

When CyberMedia was founded in 1982, India's Knowledge Industry was just taking shape. Recognizing the emergence of this new segment, it decided to publish India's first Information Technology magazine, Dataquest, at a time when the IT industry's annual revenues were less than Rs. 100 crore! Dataquest nurtured, promoted, chronicled, critiqued and influenced the industry and has been a catalyst in the industry's growth. 

CyberMedia has continued the same pioneering spirit by launching Voice & Data for the Telecom industry; PC Quest for small and medium businesses and BioSpectrum to service the nascent biotech industry. The group's journey over the last 25 years has been synonymous with the evolution of India's technology journalism as well as B2B media. CyberMedia is the first media house to have ventured outside the country to a global audience -- publishing two magazines, BioSpectrum Asia from Singapore and Global Services from the USA, the first Indian magazine titles to be published from outside the country for a global audience. 

About CyberMedia 
CyberMedia is South Asia's first and largest specialty media house, with fifteen publications (including BioSpectrum, Dataquest, DQ Channels and DQ Week, PCQuest, Voice&Data and Global Services) in the infotech, telecom, consumer electronics and biotech areas, and is a media value chain including Internet ( www.ciol.com), events and television. The group's media services include market research (IDC India), job board (CyberMedia Dice), content management, multimedia, and media education. 

For media inquiries, please contact: :
Sanjiv Kataria, Strategic Communications & PR
+ 91 98100 48095
Sanjiv.kataria@gmail.com 

At CyberMedia: 
Krishna Kumar 
Group Editor, DARE,
Ph: +91 124 4031234 
kkkg@cybermedia.co.in