Microbial Treatment of Waste by Culture- Dependent and Culture-Independent Approaches: Opportunities and Challenges 14 Juhi Gupta, Bhawna Tyagi, Rashmi Rathour, and Indu Shekhar Thakur Abstract Globally, there are concerning trends of waste generation as we progress towards a more developed society. India, the second most populous country, is on the edge of being the fifth largest economy in the world. In the last five decades, its metropolitanization has increased by approximately 10% and would further rise to 20% by 2026. The increasing urbanization and evolving lifestyles, food habits, and standards prompt such exponential expansion of robust waste. It is basically answerable for the introduction of a waste era posing various threats to health and causing ecological deformities. In 1996, the urban number created around 114,576 tonnes of municipal solid waste (MSW) per day, which is predicted to be 440,460 tonnes per day 1 by 2026. A large section of the waste is handled using the concept of 3Rs (reduce, reuse, and recycle), but the biological microbial potential is still underestimated. Less than 1% of the microbial community is culturable due to which the conservative cultural microbiology lags behind in revealing the hidden potential. This limitation is subsided by the introduction of culture-independent techniques. This chapter discusses about the possibilities of waste management using microbes both at culture-dependent and culture- independent levels. Next-generation sequencing is a relatively new and flourishing field and promises to be potent enough to supervise the waste genera- tion. Different techniques and procedures have been discussed. The future challenges for waste management lie in the lack of motivation and public unawareness. Waste management is an immediate need of the hour for a sustain- able future tomorrow as covered in the Sustainable Development Goals Agenda 2030. J. Gupta · B. Tyagi · R. Rathour · I. S. Thakur (*) School of Environmental Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, Delhi, India e-mail: isthakur@mail.jnu.ac.in # Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 T. Satyanarayana et al. (eds.), Microbial Diversity in Ecosystem Sustainability and Biotechnological Applications, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8315-1_14 415