'
Design For Recyclability' concept is similar to 'Design For Testability', 'Design For Maintainability', 'Design For Manufacturability' etc. Though 'Design For Reusability' is also a option but 'use and
throw away' model is gaining upper hand due to fast technological innovations leaving no scope for repair or reuse. To achieve 'Swatchh Bharat' goal of 'Zero Waste' and landfill free cities and villages it important to achieve either 100% reusability or 100% recyclability. So, the stress of 'Make in India' and 'Startup India' should be on 'Design For Recyclability'. Also, recyclability of recycled products itself is even important.
Focus should be on FMCG sector as it is the main contributor to waste. For example, if we take 'water bottle' as an example it has three materials - bottle, cap and label. If we can separate each material easily after use then recycling them will be easy. Moving to electronics products which consist of many type of materials this may be a difficult task to achieve and need more effort to design them for recylability.
Eco-friendly,
sustainable, biodegradable, biplastic etc may be ways for achieving eco-sustainabilty. But we should have
life cycle model (environmental analytics) of them to study whether they produce any harmful pollutant byproducts in any stage of their products or services {
1,
2,
3}.
If Environment Ministry & Niti Ayog can achieve better monitoring and control capability on recyclability by collecting 'Environment Informatation' through proper interfaces with 'Manufacturing Informatics' or 'Innovation Informatics' then planning for eco-friendly recylable products will become easy. There are a few people in India working on
Environmental Analytics. But whether India has any dedicated "Institute for Environmental Analytics/Informatics"?
Summary of 'Smart India' bullet points so far
- Each city is smart city, each village is smart village.
- Smart Transportation Network connecting smart cities and smart villages - Includes 'Highspeed Multi-mode Transportation Network' connecting cities of economical corridors, Multi-mode Transportation Informatics etc.
- Resource Planning at all levels of governance - Each ministry will have its own informatics software with interfaces to other ministries and governance levels from the union government to village panchayat. Even private enterprises can be a part of this grand National ERP by providing suitable interfaces to them similar to UPI.
- Design For Recyclability.
- Population Distribution - Cost optimized sustainable population distribution.