# Solid Waste Management > Solid Waste Management Rules 2016 for NEET-PG PSM: segregation at source, waste hierarchy, sanitary landfills, biomining legacy waste and health impacts. - Canonical URL: https://prepelephant.com/topics/neet-pg/community-medicine/solid-waste-management - Exam / course: NEET-PG · Subject: Community Medicine - Publisher: PrepElephant (https://prepelephant.com) — Prepared and reviewed by the PrepElephant Academic Review Team - First published: 2026-10-02 - Last updated: 2026-10-02 - How to cite: "Solid Waste Management", PrepElephant, https://prepelephant.com/topics/neet-pg/community-medicine/solid-waste-management ## Direct answer India's cities generate well over one and a half lakh tonnes of municipal solid waste daily, and the Solid Waste Management Rules, 2016 — notified under the Environment (Protection) Act and replacing the 2000 municipal waste rules — govern its journey from doorstep to disposal. The rules' defining move is source segregation: every household and institution must segregate into wet (biodegradable), dry (recyclable) and domestic hazardous streams, with colour-coded bins, user fees and spot fines for non-compliance. Duties are distributed across generators, urban local bodies, census towns, notified industrial townships and waste pickers, who are formally recognised into the system. Processing must follow the waste hierarchy — reduce, reuse, recycle, recover — with composting and waste-to-energy promoted, sanitary landfills reserved only for inert and reject material, and legacy dumpsites reclaimed through bioremediation and biomining. Construction waste, biomedical waste, hazardous waste, plastic and e-waste each travel under their own separate rules. ## What you must remember - **Rule and year:** SWM Rules, 2016 (Environment Protection Act) — superseding the Municipal Solid Waste Rules 2000; extended to all urban local bodies, census towns and notified townships. - **Three-stream segregation:** wet/biodegradable, dry/recyclable and domestic hazardous (wrapped sanitary waste, paints, cleaning agents) — commonly green for wet and blue for dry, hazardous collected separately. - **Generator duties:** segregate at source, hand over only to authorised collectors, pay user fee; littering invites spot fines. - **Hierarchy:** avoidance and reduction, reuse, recycling, recovery (compost, refuse-derived fuel, waste-to-energy), then disposal — landfill is the last resort. - **Sanitary landfill norms:** only for non-recyclable inert and processing rejects; lined, capped, with leachate and gas collection — restricted to a small share of total waste. - **Legacy waste:** old dumpsites to be reclaimed by bioremediation and biomining, recovering land and recyclables. - **Parallel 2016 rule family:** Construction and Demolition Waste Rules, Plastic Waste Management Rules (minimum 50-micron carry bags), Biomedical, Hazardous and E-Waste Rules — the matching-question set. - **Health relevance:** vector breeding, rodent attraction, leptospirosis among handlers, open burning releasing dioxins and furans, methane fires and dumpsite landslides. ## Segregation to landfill: the chain under the 2016 rules Walk one ward's waste through a compliant week. Monday morning, households set out two covered bins — kitchen peelings in the wet stream, plastics and paper in dry — while wrapped sanitary waste sits apart. The primary collector, often a self-help group or waste-picker cooperative now inside the formal system, collects category-wise; wet waste goes to the ward composter or biomethanisation plant, returning as compost for parks; dry waste travels to material recovery facilities where sorters separate recyclables for the market. Domestic hazardous items — a discarded thermometer, half-used insecticide — are collected on designated days into a hazardous-waste channel. The payoff is measured at the landfill gate: only inert rejects should arrive there. What actually arrives, in most cities, is far more — and that gap is the health argument. Unsegregated heaps breed Aedes and Culex, sustain rodents, and clog drains that then breed malaria's vectors; workers sorting mixed waste suffer cuts, tetanus and leptospirosis exposure; when ragpickers burn wire insulation or dumps catch fire, particulates, dioxins and furans reach downwind neighbourhoods. The 2016 rules respond with the Swachh Bharat machinery — door-to-door collection, user-fee legitimacy, ward-level processing, and the biomining of legacy mountains such as Delhi's Ghazipur. ## Rule-year questions Two patterns dominate. First, the year shuffle: 2016 rules replaced the 2000 rules, and the sister rules cluster around 2016. Second, "which is NOT" items: incineration of mixed waste as a first choice (violates hierarchy), landfilling of unprocessed waste, and open burning are the standard false options, while biomining of legacy dumpsites and three-stream segregation are the true ones. Expect one item on who owes duties — generators, local bodies, street vendors and event organisers are named — and one on hierarchy order. The health link appears as matching: open burning with dioxins and furans, dumpsites with methane fires, clogged drains with malaria, handlers with leptospirosis and tetanus. Remember that biomedical waste is a separate rulebook — stems love attaching yellow-bag chemotherapy waste to municipal rules. ## Frequently asked questions ### What are the three segregated waste streams under the 2016 rules? Wet biodegradable, dry recyclable and domestic hazardous waste, collected separately — commonly in green, blue and marked-hazardous streams — by local bodies or authorised collectors. ### What is the waste management hierarchy? Reduce, reuse, recycle and recover before disposal — processing and energy recovery are promoted while sanitary landfilling is reserved for inert rejects as the last resort. ### What is biomining of legacy waste? Excavation and mechanical screening of old dumpsites to separate recyclables, combustibles and inert soil, reclaiming land and shrinking the dump — the prescribed closure route under the rules. ### How do the SWM Rules 2016 differ from the 2000 rules? They extend beyond municipal limits, mandate source segregation and user fees, distribute duties from generator to township, formally recognise waste pickers and cap landfilling of untreated waste. ### Which wastes are governed by separate rules rather than SWM 2016? Biomedical, hazardous, construction and demolition, plastic and e-waste — each with its own notification, a favourite matching set in PSM papers.