Every Sunday in Zemithang, Arunachal Pradesh, families gather the waste they have collected through the week and bring it out for sorting.
By then, much of the work has already happened at home.
Plastic has been kept separate from glass. Metal has been sorted out. Recyclable waste has been washed and dried before it reaches the community collection point.
Across 27 villages, around 6,000 people are now part of this routine. Together, they have helped recover nearly 90 tonnes of waste.
The effort is part of the Himalayan Fringes Project, co-founded by Merwyn Coutinho and Rajiv Rathod as an initiative of Further & Beyond Foundation. The wider project has now reached more than 20,000 people, with a waste-management system that begins inside people’s homes and depends on the community to keep it running.
The sorting starts at home
In Zemithang, conventional door-to-door waste collection is difficult to organise.
Villages are scattered across challenging Himalayan terrain, and even moving waste from one point to another can become a logistical task.
So the system begins before the waste leaves home.
Families store their waste, clean it and separate it. On designated community collection days, they bring it to collection points, where it is sorted further.
And the segregation goes far beyond the familiar wet-and-dry categories. Waste is separated into 22 categories, including plastic, glass and metal.
That careful sorting matters because once different materials are mixed or contaminated, much of what could have been recycled becomes harder to recover. Keeping waste clean and separate gives more of it a chance to enter the recycling chain.
Across the wider Himalayan Fringes model, these community collection days are known as Swachhata Diwas (cleanliness days). Residents gather with sacks of household waste and sort what they have collected at designated points.
What begins as a task inside individual homes becomes a shared village routine every Sunday.
Why every family pays Rs 50
There is also a small financial contribution built into the system.
Each household contributes Rs 50 towards waste management. The money helps sustain the collection and movement of the material instead of placing the entire responsibility on an outside agency.
Women riders are also part of this chain.
Once households have segregated their waste, the riders collect the material and transport it towards a recycling centre.
In remote Himalayan settlements, that journey can be a challenge in itself. Recyclable material may have to travel long distances before reaching a facility that can process it.
This makes segregation at source especially important.
A bottle, packet or piece of metal that has been cleaned and separated has a much better chance of moving further through the recycling system than the same material mixed into a bag of household waste.
From one village to 6,000 people
The Himalayan Fringes Project began by experimenting with community-led ways of managing waste in mountain settlements.
A pilot in Chullyu showed how households could take responsibility for segregating their waste before it left their homes, while the community worked together to collect and move it onwards.
From there, the model expanded into other Himalayan communities.
Today, the Zemithang effort covers 27 villages and around 6,000 people.
The impact of thousands of households repeating these small actions can now be measured in tonnes.
Nearly 90 tonnes of waste have been recovered through the initiative so far.
In August alone, 1,479 kg of waste was responsibly managed, roughly the weight of five adult female yaks.
For communities spread across a difficult mountain landscape, that figure represents hundreds of households choosing to sort what they discard instead of allowing it to simply pile up or disappear into the surroundings.
Where does mountain waste go?
In a city, a bag of rubbish can disappear from view once a collection truck takes it away.
For a remote mountain community, the question of where that waste goes is harder to answer.
These villages do not have access to the same collection infrastructure available in large urban centres. At the same time, plastic packaging, bottles, metal and other discarded material can accumulate in settlements and eventually make their way into the surrounding landscape.
The system in Zemithang tries to intervene much earlier, while the waste is still inside people’s homes.
There is no complicated technology at the centre of it.
Instead, the model depends on thousands of people doing a few basic things consistently: keeping what they discard, washing and separating it carefully, contributing towards the system, and coming together every Sunday to make sure the waste goes where it should.
