India: Trash and the limits of sustainability (#525)

It’s impossible not to notice. The trash is everywhere.

Along footpaths and medians, in temple courtyards and outside shops, at the edges of railway platforms and beneath flyovers.

It gathers in corners like an afterthought.

When people sweep, they often sweep into a corner, not away. The pile becomes neater, but it doesn’t disappear.

What’s striking isn’t just the volume. It’s the type.

Much of it is lightweight: crinkled plastic wrappers, foil-lined packets, single-use sachets, takeaway containers. Bright, indestructible skins from processed foods. Chips. Biscuits. Instant noodles. Sugary drinks.

These aren’t banana leaves or paper cones that melt back into the soil. They’re petrochemical souvenirs of convenience, designed to outlive the moment they served.

And there are surprisingly few trash cans.

In many places, there’s nowhere obvious to put rubbish, so it ends up where gravity and habit take it: the curb, the drain, the base of a wall.

Not because people are careless, but because the system quietly assumes that someone else will deal with it later. A sweeper. A rainstorm. A cow. Time.

The sweeping itself is revealing.

Streets are swept daily in many cities, often by hand, with care and diligence. But the act stops short of removal. The trash is consolidated, not collected. Order is restored, briefly, without resolution.

The corner becomes a holding pen for things that don’t belong anywhere.

The Bigger Picture: Sustainability Isn’t a Slogan

This is where the conversation widens.

Trash on the street is not a failure of manners. It’s a failure of systems.

Sustainability isn’t just about reusable bags and earnest pledges; it’s about what happens after consumption, at scale, every day, for 1.4 billion people.

Modern sustainability rests on three pillars: design, infrastructure, and accountability.

When any one of these collapses, the street tells the truth.

Design without an exit

Most of the waste on the ground comes from products designed for speed and profit, not recovery. Single-use packaging travels thousands of miles to reach a hand for ten seconds, then remains behind for decades. There is no graceful end-of-life plan for a foil-lined sachet.

Sustainability begins upstream, and here, it often never starts.

Infrastructure that can’t keep up

Organic waste can be managed informally; plastic cannot. Without bins, sorting systems, reliable collection, and recycling capacity, waste doesn’t vanish. It migrates. Corners, drains, riverbanks. What looks like litter is often the visible edge of an overwhelmed civic system.

Accountability that’s been outsourced

Consumers are told to “be responsible,” while manufacturers quietly step away once the product is sold. The cost of disposal - environmental, financial, human - is shifted downward to municipalities, informal workers, and the poorest neighborhoods. Sustainability fails when responsibility ends at the checkout.

Why This Matters Beyond the Street

Trash doesn’t stay where it’s swept.

It blocks drains and worsens flooding. It fragments into microplastics that enter water, soil, animals, and eventually us. It creates a quiet but constant tax on public health, tourism, and dignity. And it reinforces a dangerous illusion: that growth can be endless, and consequences optional.

Perhaps the most unsettling part is how quickly the eye adjusts.

After a few days, the trash recedes into the background. It becomes scenery. The human mind is good at that. Normalizing what shouldn’t be normal. Bright packets fluttering against stone temples. Piles beside tea stalls. Corners that quietly accumulate our collective disregard.

Sustainability, at its core, is about refusing that normalization.

It asks harder questions:

• Who benefits from this convenience?

• Who pays when it’s over? and

• Why do the answers so rarely match?

Trash is not just waste. It’s evidence.

Evidence of a global system that delivers products faster than responsibility, profit faster than planning, and convenience faster than care.

Until sustainability is treated not as a virtue signal but as an obligation - built into design, enforced through policy, and shared across the entire supply chain - the corners will keep filling up.

Neatly swept. Patiently waiting.

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