386 teams recently entered a competition, showed off their cleaning skills

Nov 22, 2012 13:15 GMT  ·  By

For the time being, high officials in India are very much concerned about cleaning up the country.

This is because the people living in this part of the world have yet to figure out what to do with the trash that gets produced on a daily basis, and because estimates have shown that, by 2047, India could be producing 260 million tonnes of garbage yearly.

Needless to say, producing this much trash and not being able to properly manage it negatively impacts both on the environment, and on public health.

Since offering people advice did not really do the trick, municipal officials in charge of looking after the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh have decided to tap into the locals' competitive spirit and pretty much turned the issue of collecting and getting rid of household waste into a sport. Inter Press Service says that, as a result of this, the city of Warangal recently played host to a competition intended to see which of 386 teams from 57 different municipalities was the most green-oriented and the most efficient in terms of cleaning up waste.

The person who came up with this idea is an environmentalist named Uday Singh, who explained the working principles behind this competition as follows:

“We wanted to try and harness the spirit of competition and sportsmanship that India displays in cricket, for public health.”

After routes were mapped and each of the teams was given a trolley and a local Sanitary Inspector to act as their leader, all that remained to be done was to start moving from door to door in order to collect as much waste as possible.

Once collected, the garbage was sorted, meaning that all plastics were set aside to be recycled, wet wastes were sent to a dumpsite and scraps were selected for vermicomposting.

According to the same source, it will not be long before similar competitions are organized in various other cities of the Andhra Pradesh as well.