On matters of pollution and environmental quality…

One thing that I would like to accomplish in my blogs is to paint a picture of life in Kathmandu from a balanced perspective. We all know that wherever you live in this world, you must take the good with the bad. I don’t want to point out only the good things and neglect the problems that I see.

Jenn and I have been here for getting close to two months now and it has become very evident that environmental quality is an enormous issue. I am guilty of having a romantic notion of Nepal and the beautiful pristine Himalayas in the north and the jungles in the south where you can find an abundance of wildlife (rhinos, elephants, tigers etc.). Having spent some time now in Kathmandu (which has a population of over 1 million people), it has become obvious that the environment is a real issue here. It is very true that there are remote areas where pollution may not seem a big issue, but Kathmandu is a totally different story.

Waste management is one of the most evident issues in Kathmandu. While I have seen garbage trucks picking up garbage in woefully inadequate trucks (the size of a small pick-up truck), the vast majority of garbage in the city is burned. It is a very common thing to see bags of garbage or just loose garbage laying at the side of the road. The smell can be pretty bad too… Jenn and I have often seen people just throw their garbage into the street. It offends our sensibilities, but that being said, what is the alternative? The city evidently does not landfill their garbage, it is often just burnt… When Jenn and I package up our garbage it does get taken away, but where it goes from there we don’t really know? Most likely it is burnt somewhere, so are we really any better?

The burning of garbage, in turn, creates another very visible problem and that is air quality. At times the air will be thick with the smell of burning garbage which includes burning plastic. I can only imagine the amount of dioxins and furans which are released into the air as a by-product of burning plastic wastes. This bad air quality has played havoc with Jenn’s lungs and may be a reason why she has been suffering with symptoms of sinusitis.

I have already talked about water quality in a previous blog, but it is worth mentioning the rivers that flow through Kathmandu. These are among the most polluted waterbodies that I have seen, with floating garbage, raw sewage and sometimes even the remains of people who have been mostly cremated along the ghats at Pashupatinath temple. Because the Bagmati River flows into the Ganges River (the most sacred river to Hindu people) many practicing Hindus will have their relatives cremated and scattered into the river. Part of the problem is that wood is expensive and the bodies may not burn completely…