Don’t read this story on the most boring seminar ever on Earth Day

Yeah, I don’t care either but this is my job.

SOME/ANY CITY: I knew that headline would do something. Hopefully it shocked you into reading these words. But wait, don’t go. I promise I won’t talk about climate change and I’ll throw in a body part or two because this is Karachi after all.

But let’s start with Javed Jabbar talking about “crap”. “Sanitation is an awkward subject,” he said. “For the first time I’m going to try and say something profound on the subject of toilets.” He was at the podium at the Institution of Engineers Pakistan  Tuesday where engineers were gathered to celebrate Earth Day by talking about sanitation.

No one laughed at Jabbar’s opening. Engineers tend to be a humourless lot. It was weird that they had come together to celebrate Earth Day - sort of like preaching to the converted. Shouldn’t the KMC garbage men have been at this four-hour long seminar with no biscuits?

Half way through Jabbar’s speech I thought I was going to fall asleep but then he did something cool. He noted how few women were in the audience. He then brought up an outstanding woman, Quratulain Bakhtiari, who developed soak pits in Baldia in the 1970s. Karachi’s sewage system may be a mess right now, but we come from a long line of engineering marvels. Just check out Moen jo Daro, said Jabbar. It was the earliest system to use water to flush out waste 5,000 years ago.

That’s all great, but Karachi is 20 million people today. What does it do with its battery acid or all the “crap” that comes out of our factories? This was when Gulzar Firoze  came up to the podium. “I am an industrialist,” he declared. “I am a major polluter.” I woke up.

Firoze  helped start the first combined effluent treatment plant in Korangi which cleans the wastewater tanneries would otherwise dump into the sea. It’s not a perfect system, though, as not all tanneries are on board. Plus, many more treatment plants are needed. Ten years ago they studied the feasibility for five more plants and the cost was pegged at Rs3 billion. Nothing happened and today it would cost Rs10 billion to set them up. “I fail to see any commitment from the federal or Sindh governments,” said Firoze . But instead of just kvetching, he put his money where his mouth was: “I challenge [the government],” he said. “Give me a taskforce. I’ll head it [to set them up]. I don’t want to work under any bureaucrat. I’ll arrange the funding from foreign donors. I’ll get the land.” He’d do it in six months.

After Firoze spoke, much to my disappointment, Prof. Noman Ahmed showed no body parts when he presented on hospital solid waste management. Karachi’s hospitals produced 650 tons of infectious waste per day according to 2005 estimates. That will go up to 1,120 tons per day by 2020.

The body parts are called ‘anatomic waste’. The city government used to run an incinerator but it stopped working in 2010. Private hospitals don’t budget for waste disposal and because there is no regulation, they dodge the bullet. Contractors recycle much of the waste material. Prof. Noman said that even though it seems like a small problem, hospital waste management has a big impact.

We can partly see that manifest on Karachi’s land but in one of the last presentations, engineer Pervez Sadiq gave a stunning overview of what happens to the sea when all of the city’s raw, untreated sewage, factory effluent and hospital waste makes its way into the water. Sadiq has been scuba diving for 35 years and has slowly had to move further and further away from the Clifton beach to go underwater. “Now if you dive at Native Jetty you’ll emerge with Hepatitis ABCDEFG,” he joked. “The only spot left is Charna Island 50km from here.”

See, I didn’t use the words ‘Climate change’ once in this piece. Aren’t you glad?

Published in The Express Tribune, April 24^th, 2014.