Q.List all the wastes that you generate, at home, school or during your trips to other places. Could you very easily reduce the generation of these wastes? Which would be difficult or rather impossible to reduce?

Step 1. At home, typical waste includes food waste, plastic packaging, paper, glass, batteries, and old electronics; at school, it includes paper, stationery waste and food waste from canteens; while travelling, it includes single-use plastic bottles, food containers and wrappers -- matching the residential, institutional and commercial waste categories the chapter itself tabulates.

Step 2. Many of these are genuinely easy to reduce by applying the chapter's 4R mantra -- Refuse unnecessary plastic items, Reduce overall consumption, Reuse containers and bags, and Recycle paper/plastic/glass -- for example, carrying a reusable water bottle or cloth bag instead of buying single-use plastic ones. …

Sort personally generated waste by category, then separate genuinely reducible consumer waste fr …

• Treating all waste as equally reducible by individual choice, ignoring that some streams (e-waste, biomedical waste) are structurally unavoidable. …