ISWM Detailed Project Report: the document a waste management system is sanctioned and built on.

Waste quantification and characterisation, projected generation, the design of segregated collection, transport and transfer, the processing facilities proposed with their technology basis, sanitary landfill design for rejects, environmental and social safeguards, capital and operating cost estimates, the funding and procurement route, the institutional and O&M arrangement, and an implementation schedule with phasing.

Among other duties, they place responsibility on waste generators to segregate at source into biodegradable, non-biodegradable and domestic hazardous streams and hand waste over to authorised collectors, and they require local bodies to arrange segregated collection and transport, to process biodegradable and recyclable fractions, and to restrict landfilling to inert rejects and residues. The Rules also cover facility siting, buffer zones and authorisation from the State Pollution Control Board.

Through a characterisation study: sampling waste as delivered over a representative number of days and, where seasonality matters, across seasons, and determining the physical composition, moisture content, calorific value and, for composting, the carbon-to-nitrogen ratio. Estimating from per-capita norms alone is not adequate for sizing processing plants, because composition varies far more between towns than quantity does.

Composting and bio-methanation take the wet biodegradable fraction, with bio-methanation better suited to consistently segregated, high-moisture organic waste and offering energy recovery, and composting more tolerant and simpler to run. A material recovery facility sorts and bales the dry recyclable fraction. Refuse-derived fuel uses the high-calorific dry rejects, and depends entirely on a confirmed offtake such as a cement kiln.

Because the Rules direct that landfilling be restricted to non-recyclable, non-biodegradable, non-combustible inert waste and process residues, with everything else diverted to processing. That principle drives the whole design, a sanitary landfill sized for total generation rather than for rejects both violates the intent of the Rules and consumes land that will be exhausted quickly.

Feedstock. A composting or bio-methanation plant fed with mixed waste produces poor-quality output that cannot be sold and shuts down within a few years, which is the pattern across many Indian towns. Segregation at source, enforced through collection practice rather than assumed on paper, is the precondition on which the processing design stands or falls.

Typically through a combination of central and state programme funding for urban infrastructure, local body budget, and user charges or tipping fees for operations, with private participation under concession or O&M contracts for processing facilities. The DPR has to make the operating cost and its recovery explicit, projects that secure capital funding but no operating revenue are the ones that stop running.

It is a separate stream under the Construction and Demolition Waste Management Rules 2016, requiring its own collection and processing arrangement, and an ISWM plan for a city should address it. But it is not treated within the municipal solid waste facilities. Mixing C&D waste into MSW collection is a common and costly failure, since inert rubble consumes landfill volume that the Rules intend to conserve.