is itWASTED

is it WASTED

Every piece of rubbish in your house has a future. Don't let that future be a landfill.

A guide for Indian homes on how to sort your trash the way the new rules ask.✱

Find out where your trash goes

Or play the game and learn it by losing.

What is in here

Everything on this site, in one place.

The guideLook anything up. One answer, with the reason.Look something up → The gameBe the bin. Eat yours, jump the rest.Play it → Five things a dayFive things a day. The same five for everyone.Take today’s five → Litter mapSeen a dumped pile in Bhubaneswar or Cuttack? Put it on the map for a clean-up.Report a spot → The blog Notes from doing this badly at home.Read it → Where the answers come fromEvery item, the reasoning behind its answer, and the document it rests on.Check our working →
What happens to itWhere India's waste actually ends up.coming

Why bother

It is less work than it sounds, and you get something back.

Two bins do the daily work. The other two fill slowly, over weeks. That is the whole thing.

Should you just search online instead?

You can. Most of what comes back is written for other countries, where the bins and the trucks work differently. "Can I recycle this" gets you American kerbside rules.

This is for Indian homes: milk pouches, puja flowers, the kabadiwala, your ward collector. One answer for each thing, not ten pages of them.

Try it out, look something up →

What your bin decides

Same rubbish. Two endings.

If it leaves your home sorted

Your bins keep them apart. Food in one, clean dry things in the other.

A plant can use it. Wet waste becomes compost or gas. Dry waste is sold on and recycled.

USED AGAIN

Soil, gas, new paper and plastic.

If it all goes in one bag

One bag, everything in it. Food, wrappers, batteries, all touching.

Nobody can pull it apart. Wet food ruins the dry half, and the rest is too wet to burn.

WASTED

On a dump. 26 crore tonnes are already waiting there.

Which ending your rubbish gets is decided in your kitchen, in the few seconds before it leaves your hand.

Try it out, look something up →

Meet the bins

Four bins. That is what the rules ask every home for.

Wet, dry, sanitary and special care are the four streams every home has to separate, under rule 5(1)(b) of the Solid Waste Management Rules, 2026, in force since 1 April 2026. The colours are the ones the government uses in its own explainer. What your city collects can still differ, so check what your ward asks for as well. You do not need to buy anything. Old buckets, sacks and bags do the job.

Try it out, look something up →

Start here

Four bins is all it takes to start.

It opens on your four bins and a search box. Type what is in your hand and it tells you where it goes, and why.

Open the guide
Why this site existsWho made it, and what set them off

I used to think the bin was a black hole.

As a kid I believed that once something went in the bin, it was gone. The lid shut and it simply stopped existing. I never wondered where it went, because as far as I knew it went nowhere.

Then I watched a documentary about what happens to rubbish after it leaves the house. I went on to read about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and what disturbed me most was working out where it actually comes from. I learned how developing countries end up as the dumping ground for richer ones.

None of it is far away. I still see litter on the streets of my own city, and every winter people burn their rubbish.

So I want to manage waste properly, starting with my own, so that we stop making the problems I saw. Whether something gets recycled is mostly decided at home, in the few seconds before it leaves your hand.

If you are new to this, that is fine. Most of us are. Look up the trash in your hand and we will work it out together.