If you live in an Indian city, you’ve probably driven past a landfill at some point. The smell hits you before you see it — a sour, decomposing reek that lingers on your clothes. What most people don’t realise is that this smell is almost entirely from one source: wet waste.
The wet waste crisis, in numbers
India generates around 160,000 tonnes of municipal solid waste every day. Over half of it — roughly 85,000 tonnes — is wet waste. Almost all of it is sent to landfills, where it does enormous damage.
The biggest issue isn’t volume. It’s that wet waste should never have been in a landfill in the first place.
What happens to wet waste in landfills
Wet waste in a landfill is buried under layers of plastic, glass, and dry waste. Without oxygen, it doesn’t compost — it ferments. This anaerobic decomposition produces:
- Methane — a greenhouse gas roughly 25 times more potent than CO₂. India’s landfills are estimated to contribute a significant share of national methane emissions.
- Leachate — a toxic black liquid that seeps into groundwater. In cities like Delhi and Bengaluru, leachate from old landfills has been detected in surrounding boreholes.
- Landfill fires — methane build-up regularly catches fire, spewing toxic smoke across entire neighbourhoods. The Bhalswa and Ghazipur fires have made headlines for years.
Why the problem keeps growing
Indian cities were never designed for this volume of waste. Most municipal systems still collect everything in one truck, mixed together. Segregation rules exist on paper but aren’t enforced consistently. So wet waste — biodegradable, compostable, useful — ends up locked inside plastic bags, suffocating in a landfill.
The cruelest irony
Wet waste, handled correctly, is one of the most useful resources available to a city. It can become:
- High-quality compost for urban agriculture
- Biogas for cooking or electricity
- Nutrient-rich soil amendments
Cities like Indore, which now have aggressive segregation and decentralised composting, have shown what’s possible. Indore diverts a huge percentage of its wet waste away from landfills and into productive use. There’s no technical mystery here. It’s a question of willingness.
What this means for you
Until cities solve this at the policy level, the burden falls on households. The single biggest thing any urban Indian can do for waste management is to compost their wet waste at home. It’s the only way to be certain your food scraps aren’t ending up in a methane-producing landfill.
A home composter is, in a real sense, a private climate intervention. It pulls your wet waste out of a broken system and turns it into something useful — at zero cost to your city.