The story of trash
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In today’s edition of The Daily Brief:
The seven steps of waste management
What does a next generation financial system look like?
The seven steps of waste management
What happens to your waste once it leaves your home?
Most of us picture garbage trucks or trashbins — the visible end of a complex chain. But that’s just the closest end of a seven-step process, which begins the moment waste is created and continues through monitoring and regulation. The seven steps — generation, segregation, collection, transportation, processing, disposal, and monitoring — form a single interconnected chain. Weakness in any area can bring down the entire system.
Unfortunately, in India, waste often jumps directly from generation to disposal, skipping crucial middle steps. That’s why mountains of mixed garbage pile up in dumps instead of being turned into valuable resources.
As a commercial opportunity, the sector is worth about $7.85 billion and is expected to grow at over 5% annually. But there are many niches in this chain that are, yet, unexplored. A lot goes into converting waste to wealth, and understanding the complete journey is extremely important, if you want to get a sense of the sector. So let’s break each step down.
Waste Generation and Segregation
India generates over 170,000 tonnes of municipal solid waste daily, according to the Central Pollution Control Board. That is a lot.
It’s not that each of us generates that much garbage. Others are much more prolific. Americans, for instance, throw away 2.2 kg per person daily, while the average Indian generates only 123.45 grams per day (although that is likely underestimated). But with 1.4 billion people, even small amounts per person can create mountains of waste.
What makes things more complicated is that there are many types of waste, and ideally, they should all be handled differently. There’s household and commercial garbage, which together form Municipal Solid Waste (MSW). There’s also hospital waste, hazardous industrial waste, construction debris, and electronic waste — which aren’t even included in the official figures, making them much harder to track.
Ideally, that waste would all be segregated. That is, it should be sorted right at the source into wet (biodegradable), dry (recyclable), and hazardous categories. That would make everything else much simpler.
But that’s not something we do. Although the government mandated segregation in 2016, not a single state achieved 100% segregation as of 2022. Many cities simply don't enforce rules strictly, fearing voter backlash. Most states report segregation levels below 50%, and some towns don’t even have the practice of segregation. Worse still, even when people segregate carefully, garbage trucks often mix everything together because cities lack separate collection systems.
That poor segregation from the start means that all our waste gets mixed together, messing up the entire journey.
Collection
Collection is where someone comes to your home and picks up your garbage. This might sound basic, but it's actually a massive logistical operation, with thousands of workers and vehicles going door-to-door through entire cities every single day.
The primary responsibility for door-to-door garbage collection lies with urban local bodies. Cities spend huge amounts on collection — fielding thousands of sanitation workers for the job. In fact, 60-70% of their entire waste management budget often goes just to picking up garbage.
But some cities are experimenting with public-private partnerships. Private companies help plug in major gaps — in investment, equipment, technology, expertise, manpower, and more. They can raise capital to buy expensive equipment that cash-strapped and bureaucracy-ridden municipalities can't afford.
Antony Waste is one of the major companies in this space. It is one of the top five players in India's MSW management industry, and works with municipalities in Mumbai, Noida, and Delhi, to name a few. Its business runs across the waste management value chain, in fact. But among other things, they carry out mechanized road sweeping, and collect waste.
There are others in the space, though. A lot of Chennai's waste collection and transportation system, for instance, is run by Re Sustainability Limited (formerly Ramky Enviro Engineers). It covers 115.5 square kilometers of the city with 850 electric vehicles, 15 compactors, and 15 mechanical sweepers. They also conducted an extensive waste collection and transportation project with the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation.
But the champions of this story are India's informal sector.
India has an estimated 1.5 million waste pickers and scrap dealers, who recover over 20% of municipal waste. They plug in some of our gaping issues with segregation. They sort through our mountains of garbage to separate materials like plastic bottles, newspapers, and metal scraps. This network achieves recycling rates of 70-80% for paper and over 90% for metals, — rates that match developed countries, through a completely different system. They then sell these materials to aggregators who supply recycling factories.
Collecting garbage is a complicated endeavour, and we often end up with gaps. In fact, some hard-to-reach areas get skipped altogether. For example, CPCB says Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh is “a bin-less town”. There’s simply no infrastructure to handle their waste.
But even where coverage is good, service can be unreliable — collection routinely gets delayed as bins overflow. And if all the garbage is collected, most of it is still done by hand, with workers lifting heavy bins and bags into trucks. These systems are often stretched to the limit, and can break down if even one worker falls ill. Many cities don't have enough vehicles, or have old trucks that keep breaking down.
These vehicles are needed not only for collection, but also for the next step.
Transportation
Once waste is collected, it usually goes to processing plants, recycling facilities, or landfills. And how does it go there? Through transportation.
Transportation is typically managed by municipal bodies or their waste management contractors. Municipal vehicle fleets include thousands of garbage trucks, compactor trucks, open dump trucks, tipper vans, as well as smaller autos and handcarts.
But the private sector has a role to play as well.
Companies like Antony Waste Handling and Re Sustainability Limited transport waste as well. Often, they operate ‘transfer stations’ — intermediate facilities where smaller collection vehicles dump their loads before larger trucks take it to distant treatment facilities or landfills.
Processing & Treatment
Ideally, at this point, that waste would be “processed” into something useful.
That could mean different things:
Wet waste can be put in compost plants, turning it into fertiliser.
Recyclable waste should go to material recovery facilities (MRFs) — giant sorting centers where mixed recyclable waste gets separated into different types of materials, so they can be recycled efficiently.
This waste can also go into waste-to-energy plants, which burn garbage to generate electricity. India currently has 11 waste-to-energy plants which deal with just MSW and generate about 132 MW of electricity.
Many cities also run their own municipal compost plants — Indore operates aerobic composting units for all its wet waste, Mumbai runs several composting sites, and Chennai operates biomethanation plants at markets.
Overall, around 50% of India’s MSW gets processed — at least as per government data — and around 60% of the plastic waste collected gets recycled.
For specialized waste, the system works differently. These are all complex and often dangerous things, and working with them is a challenging task.
To move hazardous waste, for instance, one must follow strict rules. Each shipment must be documented and carried by licensed transporters using trucks with special hazardous material signs.
E-waste, in practice, follows two completely different paths: there’s an informal sector, where old electronics are often bought by local scrap dealers or kabadiwalas, who pay small amounts for phones and computers. Meanwhile, electronics companies themselves run programs to channel e-waste to authorized recycling facilities to meet their legal responsibilities. About one-third of the total generated was formally processed in 2021-22 — not a lot, but still an improvement from ~10% in 2017-18.
Biomedical waste collection is handled by licensed Common Biomedical Waste Treatment Facility (CBWTF) operators. Hospitals tie up with these firms, who send out dedicated vans daily to collect segregated medical waste bins. This small niche alone was valued at $2.32 billion in 2024 and is expected to grow at 7-8% annually.
Naturally, here too, private players play a big role.
Antony Waste provides integrated waste processing services, with facilities that handle everything from regular waste, to construction debris, to organic waste. At its flagship Kanjurmarg site in Mumbai — the largest such facility in Asia — it operates a 4,000+ TPD integrated waste processing plant.
Re Sustainability Limited, meanwhile, handles over 1 million tonnes per annum of industrial hazardous waste across 22 locations. They also operate waste-to-energy plants in Hyderabad and Delhi.
Gravita India Ltd, a publicly listed leader in battery and aluminium recycling, operates large-scale smelting and recovery units and its integrated approach makes it one of India’s most efficient processors of hazardous and industrial waste streams.
Still, problems persist.
Poor segregation means facilities receive contaminated waste — imagine trying to make good compost when organic waste is mixed with plastic bags and glass pieces. Several waste-to-energy plants have failed because Indian waste is too wet and low-quality to burn efficiently. For construction waste, the situation is terrible. Less than 1% gets recycled even though technology exists to turn debris into useful building materials.
And when they don’t get processed, they go to the next step.
Disposal, Monitoring & Regulation
If waste can't be recycled, composted, or processed, it needs to be disposed.
Usually, it’s all dumped at a garbage dump somewhere. India has over 1,300 such garbage dumps, with ~87 million tonnes of accumulated waste. But these are bursting at the seams. Cities are running out of space for new landfills, because of the high land costs and public opposition. And so, they keep overloading existing sites, creating huge, unstable garbage mountains. In fact, in 2017, an ~80 foot mountain of trash collapsed in Delhi, killing several people.
Every day, tonnes of fresh waste gets dumped without any treatment at 450+ sites across India. These aren't even landfills, they're just open piles of trash, with no protection of any sort.
These aren’t just eyesores. Open dumps pollute soil and groundwater, and emit methane gas that contributes to climate change. Sometimes they catch fire, creating toxic smoke that blankets cities. Recently in Kochi, for instance, the Brahmapuram dump caught fire, covering the entire city in toxic smoke.
It’s not as though these are all hopeless. Some cities are making serious efforts to address this legacy problem. Indore, for instance, famously eliminated its landfill by bio-mining 1.5 million tonnes of old garbage, sorting out recyclables, and turning everything else into usable soil. The site of the landfill is now a green park.
Companies like Antony Waste also manage sanitary engineered landfills, and while using advanced garbage compaction technology to compress garbage, so that they take less space in a landfill.
How do you prevent that much waste going to landfills? Well, you have to process or recycle as much waste as possible, so less goes to dump yards. That is a journey that starts at the very beginning of the chain, from segregation at home.
The Path Forward
India's waste management often skips crucial middle steps. Every time a step is bypassed, however, the entire chain breaks down. That dysfunction ripples all the way down the chain, ending at these garbage dumps.
Conversely, though, the better we get at following each step in the chain, the more the entire system strengthens. Good segregation makes collection more efficient. Clean collection improves processing quality. Effective processing reduces disposal burdens. And so on.
To solve India's waste crisis, there are many steps in this chain that must be fixed. Some of those also lend themselves to commercial opportunities. As private players have come in, that has helped us make a lot of progress. But we can do better. In a world where sustainability and growth are often at loggerheads, this is a billion-dollar industry with the side-effect of a liveable, breathable, healthy environment.
What does a next generation financial system look like?
There’s an institution that most people know nothing about. But it releases a report every year which the financial world treats as scripture.
That institution is the ‘Bank for International Settlements’ — or the BIS. Many call it the “central bank of central banks.” It doesn’t make headlines like the Federal Reserve or the European Central Bank, but when it speaks, everyone from central bankers to finance ministers take note.
See, the BIS marries monetary theory to financial plumbing. It lays out how monetary systems should work — and what needs to be fixed. They aren’t yet out with this year’s report, but they've released a chapter early. The chapter lays out a sweeping vision for what the next generation of money could look like. In one word, it is tokenisation.
Now, monetary systems are Greek and Latin to most people, us included. But we thought we’d take the plunge, dive into the esoterica, and try and explain what we understood.
The core of the chapter: Redesigning the foundations of money
The chapter in question is “The next-generation monetary and financial system.” Its argument is simple but radical: we’re entering an era where money, and everything to do with it, can be rebuilt from the ground up using a new kind of digital infrastructure — something far more powerful and flexible than what we have today.
That architecture is tokenisation. That’s the idea behind cryptocurrencies as well, but that’s not what the BIS focuses on. They see tokenisation as a way of making money and assets digitally native and programmable — which could create a safer, faster, smarter financial system. This system would still revolve around central banks, but would work at a speed and scale that’s appropriate for the digital age.
But before we get there, let’s start at a very fundamental idea: what makes a good money system in the first place?
The three tests for a healthy monetary system
According to the BIS, for any monetary system to work — whether it’s coins, paper money, or digital tokens — it has to pass three basic tests:
Singleness: All forms of money in the system should be worth the same, and must settle at full value. If I have ₹100 in my bank and you have ₹100 in another bank, both should be identical in value. This keeps the system stable and fair.
Elasticity: The amount of money in the system should be flexible — especially in times of stress or when large payments are due. This avoids situations where payments get stuck or delayed just because there isn’t enough “liquidity” in the system. For example, during a financial crisis or a pandemic, the central bank should be able to pump more money into the system quickly to prevent a freeze in lending or payments. A rigid system would buckle under pressure of such moments.
Integrity: The system should be safe from fraud, money laundering, and other shady behavior. Trust matters. If the system’s money is constantly being used for illegal stuff — if it is being used mostly by criminals or can't be tracked when something goes wrong — people lose faith in the system. And without people’s trust, it stops working as a money system.
Today’s central bank-led systems generally passes these three tests. They may be clunky or slow, but they work. Any future system that replaces these should not just keep passing these tests, but actually improve on them.
Why stablecoins don’t pass the test
At this point, the BIS turns its attention to stablecoins — private digital tokens like USDC or Tether, which claim to maintain a stable value by being backed by real-world money or assets.
Think of stablecoins as digital IOUs. Each stablecoin token promises that you can redeem it for a specific amount of real-world money — usually one dollar. If you hold one USDC, you’re supposed to be able to get one US dollar for it, any time. Because of that promise, they are mostly used in crypto trading to move money quickly without converting it to traditional bank money.
Only, these are not issued by central banks. They’re issued by private companies. And the 'stability' depends entirely on whether those companies are telling you the truth — that they really hold those assets and are able to return your money when asked.
Stablecoins might sound like a viable payment solution: money with the benefits of cryptocurrencies, but with the volatility. But the BIS completely dismantles that idea. According to them, stablecoins fail all three tests.
First, they fail singleness. For money to work well, any unit should be worth the same as another — no matter who holds it, or where. But stablecoins don’t guarantee that. Even the most popular ones like Tether can trade below par, especially during stress. In a crisis, redemption becomes difficult, and the token no longer equals the dollar it’s supposed to represent.
Second, they fail elasticity. Good money systems can expand or contract based on economic needs. But stablecoins operate on a rigid “cash-in-advance” model: new coins can only be created if someone puts real money in. This limits their usefulness in a crisis, when economies need flexible liquidity.
Third, they fail integrity. Stablecoins often run on public blockchains where users are anonymous, and there’s little oversight. That opens the door to money laundering, terrorist financing, and other illicit use. It’s not that stablecoins are necessarily evil or fraudulent — but because of their structure they’re not a great candidate for being money.
What’s the alternative? Enter tokenisation
The real heart of this chapter is the promise of tokenisation.
Let’s pause and explain what that actually means. In simple terms, tokenisation is the process of turning anything of value — money, stocks, bonds, or even art — into a digital token. This token lives on a secure, programmable platform. This isn’t just a matter of representing things online. These tokens are based on rules. They interact with other tokens automatically, and settle instantly.
Right now, if you want to buy a house, here’s what you do:
You sign papers.
You wait for banks to process the mortgage.
The registry takes days to update.
Money moves through separate systems.
Now imagine if the ownership deed of the house and the money you’re paying both exist as digital tokens on the same platform. As soon as both tokens are ready — your money and the house deed — the transaction could execute automatically. You don’t bear the stress of figuring out when your loan will come through, or making rounds of the registry. The ownership shifts and the money moves in real time. There’s no room for disputes. Everything is coded into the system.
That’s the promise of tokenisation. It collapses multiple layers — payments, verification, ownership, compliance — into a single, unified operation.
The concrete benefits of tokenisation
To BIS, tokenisation eliminates the frictions in today’s system — reconciliation between banks, delays in settlement, the costs of verifying transactions. Consider this: in today’s banking world, when a payment is made, it goes through messaging networks, clearing systems, and then finally settlement. With tokenisation, all of this is collapsed into a single system. The token itself holds all the information you need to trigger the transfer, check its validity, and complete the deal instantly.
Imagine a bond that pays you interest every three months. Today, the issuer has to manually calculate interest, and then instruct their bank to credit the right amount to your account. In a tokenised bond, the bond token is coded to know when the next payment is due — at which point, it automatically transfers the right amount to you. All of it without someone having to get in the way.
But there’s more. Tokenisation allows what the BIS calls “atomic settlement”. Imagine you’re buying a large piece of land. There may be a point where, for instance, you’ve wired them the money, but there’s no guarantee that you have title over the land. You just have to trust that they wouldn’t cheat you. But if the status of ownership is itself tracked digitally, you don’t need that uncertainty. Your trade only goes through if the other side has given instructions for the land to come to you. Neither side can back out. The code itself ensures fairness.
But none of this works without central banks
That said, the wider frame within which this system works is not very different from our own. This is not a vision of the future where private players create all the money, in some sort of financial Wild West. Central banks remain the foundation of their vision. Everything else — commercial banks, fintechs, programmable assets — builds on top of that.
That’s because central banks must play four roles.
First, they need to provide tokenised central bank reserves. Today, commercial banks settle large payments with each other using central bank money — like a base layer that everyone trusts. In the future, this base layer needs to be tokenised too. Without it, all the other digital tokens in the system float without an anchor. When reserves themselves are tokenised, every other transaction is built on a foundation of trust and legal certainty.
Second, central banks set the rules for this system. They give a token legally valid, determine how smart contracts should behave, and create a system to resolve disputes. Without clear, centrally defined rules, the system could spiral into chaos, with each player setting their own standards.
Third, they need to act as connectors. In the same way that smartphone operating systems allow developers to build apps, central banks should provide the secure infrastructure where private players can innovate safely. They create the framework within which banks, startups, and payment providers experiment with new products — and they must do so without jeopardising the system’s stability.
Finally, they must preserve the “two-tier” system. In today’s world, central banks issue money, but people like you and me use banks to access it. That division works well: commercial banks manage customers, loans, and credit, while central banks maintain trust. In the new world of tokenisation, we don’t want central banks to have to deal directly with every citizen. That would overload them.
It’s not about tech — it’s about trust
For all the talk of ledgers, tokens, and smart contracts, the BIS keeps coming back to one old-school idea: trust. The future of money must be trustworthy. It must work in crises. It must include everyone. And it must anchor itself in institutions people can rely on.
It is only if a system has trust that it would be a true evolution from our current system of money. Replacing our monetary system wholesale with something like cryptocurrency is a fever dream. But we can redesign our system of money using its best features — while keeping the foundations of money strong.
If tokenisation is done right, they argue, it might just make that foundation even stronger.
Tidbits
Govt Scraps TOT Model; ₹1.6 Trillion Monetisation Drive to Now Rely on InvITs
Source: Business Standard
The government has officially discontinued the Toll-Operate-Transfer (TOT) model, which accounted for over ₹48,995 crore or 35.1% of NHAI’s total asset monetisation so far. Union Minister Nitin Gadkari confirmed the shift, citing concerns over disproportionate returns to foreign investors and limited domestic access. The focus now moves entirely to Infrastructure Investment Trusts (InvITs), which are expected to offer around 8.05% returns to investors. The highways ministry had earlier achieved 71% of its ₹1.6 trillion monetisation target for FY22–FY25, largely through TOT. The ministry had also planned three new TOT bundles per quarter, but that direction has been overruled. Instead, Gadkari personally intervened with NITI Aayog to revise the targets, ensuring they are now met solely via InvITs.
Tata Capital Launches ₹1,752 Cr Rights Issue Ahead of IPO, Tata Sons to Infuse ₹1,630 Cr
Source: Business Standard
Tata Capital Ltd has launched a ₹1,752 crore rights issue as part of its capital-raising efforts ahead of its proposed IPO, expected by September 2025. Tata Sons, which owns a 93% stake in the company, will subscribe to approximately ₹1,630 crore of this issue. This follows a previous rights issue in March 2024, where Tata Sons had infused ₹1,400 crore out of the ₹1,504 crore raised. In the same board meeting, Tata Capital also approved a debt raise of up to ₹30,000 crore through NCDs, green bonds, and other market-linked instruments. The funds are intended to support the company’s lending operations and strengthen its balance sheet. Tata Capital, classified as an Upper Layer NBFC by the RBI, is required to list by September 2025 as per regulatory norms. The company has already received SEBI approval for the IPO.
Biocon Exits China Semaglutide Plans Amid Local Saturation
Source: Business Line
Biocon has officially withdrawn its plans to launch generic versions of semaglutide-based drugs Ozempic and Wegovy in China, citing a saturated market. The move comes as at least 15 Chinese drugmakers are already developing biosimilars of the popular diabetes and weight-loss drug. Biocon, which had earlier conducted clinical trials, has decided against registering or supplying either the finished formulation or the active pharmaceutical ingredient in China. The decision coincides with the upcoming expiry of the semaglutide patent in China in early 2026. The company will now focus on other global markets for its semaglutide portfolio. Biocon’s exit highlights the growing presence of local competition in high-demand therapeutic areas.
- This edition of the newsletter was written by Prerana and Krishna.
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Nice article as always. Why wasn't there an aftermarket report on Friday?
Very informative. I believe this line should be “without” the volatility? “Stablecoins might sound like a viable payment solution: money with the benefits of cryptocurrencies, but with the volatility.”