Integrated Solid Waste Management in Wagle Estate MIDC, Thane.

Waste from a Wagle Estate unit comes in three streams that often end up mixed on the same shop floor: hazardous waste under the unit's authorisation: spent solvent, oily rags, ETP sludge; recyclable scrap such as metal turnings, cartons and film; and ordinary waste from the canteen and office. Mixing them is how a skip of saleable scrap becomes a hazardous-waste problem. We set up segregation where waste is generated, labelled storage, and records tying each stream to an authorised recycler or disposal route.

Wagle Estate is a grid of numbered roads in Thane West, lined with sheds, galas and multi-storey industrial buildings, with the Yeoor hills rising behind. Its units are mostly small and medium (engineering shops, packaging converters, pharmaceutical and chemical formulators) and many share one building, one yard and one drain. Over the years some plots have been rebuilt as IT parks and office blocks, so a machine shop may now stand beside a floor of desks. Dense housing and settlements have grown up along its edges and up the lower slopes, and people now live within a wall's width of working units. The estate is changing tenant by tenant rather than all at once.