While the Madurai City Corporation is working on a war footing to eliminate public dumping through door-to-door waste collection, some residents are pushing back progress. Unable to meet the collection vehicles’ schedules, they have resorted to dumping and burning their garbage in nearby open spaces.

For many working professionals and daily wage earners, the morning window for waste collection has proven nearly impossible to catch.

“The vehicle passes through our street at a time when most of us are either rushing to work or getting children ready for school,” says a resident of K.K. Nagar, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

“With the public dumper bins removed from the main roads to discourage open dumping, we are left with no choice but to store garbage at home or find another way out.” That way out has increasingly become the nearest open space.

To manage the accumulating stench and volume, residents have taken to burn the waste—a practice that releases toxic smoke into the local atmosphere.

A space along Alagarkoil Road near Corporation office, unknown individuals have incinerated the waste dumped for over a week.

A roadside eatery shop owner in the area said, the garbage remained unremoved for over four days, and all of a sudden, some one had burnt it all by dumping it at one single location. “This has caused ashes to fly all over the surrounding areas,” he added.

Environmentalists have repeatedly warned that this shift from public dumping to localised incineration poses severe health risks.

Open-air burning of household waste, which frequently, includes plastics and food packaging, releases harmful pollutants like dioxins and fine particulate matter directly into residential air space.

While the Corporation’s initiative aimed to make Madurai a cleaner city, garbage-free city, et al, the lack of flexibility in the pickup network is inadvertently shifting the crisis from a litter problem to an air quality and public health hazard, they expressed concern.

Door-to-door waste collection system

Experts have also suggested that for door-to-door waste collection system to achieve 100% compliance, the Corporation may need to re-evaluate its logistics.

Some of the suggestions were implementing secondary evening shifts for high-density or working-class residential zones, installing smart, enclosed community drop-boxes in neighbourhoods where residents can securely deposit waste outside of standard pickup hours and enforcing stricter penalties for open burning alongside public awareness campaigns regarding the health hazards of plastic smoke.

Such similar incidents have been reported in locations like Anna Nagar, Sellur, Goripalayam, Iyer Bungalow, among others.

Corporation officials refused to give any instruction to the workers to incinerate the garbage dumped in open areas.

“We have ensured that the residents who are involved in burning the waste are being penalised. Also, we have formulated plans to fill the gap in the door-to-door garbage collection,” they added.