Waste management need of the hour: Minister

New Delhi, Nov 21 (IANS) Union Urban Development Minister Hardeep Singh Puri on Tuesday said waste management is the "need of the hour" and stressed on maximising re-use and recycling.

"Sustainable waste management is the need of the hour, which involves managing waste in an environmentally sound, socially satisfactory, and techno-economically viable manner," Puri said after inaugurating a workshop here.

"The waste management hierarchy demands, firstly, avoiding generation of waste, followed by reducing, reusing, recycling, recovering, treating, and disposing whatever waste is produced. The fundamental objective should be to maximize re-use and recycling so that minimum land space is occupied for disposal and at the same time natural resources and energy are saved," Puri said.

Puri said there was pressing need for awareness about waste management and the necessity to adopt proper procedure for collection, processing, recycling, and use of construction and demolition waste in manufacturing building components.

"It is a known fact that we cannot continue to make use of conventional building material which continue to depend on finite natural resources mainly drawing upon the carrying capacity of the ecosystem and often causes irreparable environmental damages... the challenge posed by the emerging trends of higher consumption levels has to be met within the concept of sustainable development, of which gainful utilisation of waste is one of the important components," the Minister added.