Mangalore City Corporation will distribute 7,800 plastic bins to houses and apartments at Mannagudda and Court wards shortly, on an experimental basis, to encourage people to segregate organic waste and dry waste from solid waste.
They would be distributed free of cost.
Harish Kumar K, Commissioner of the corporation, told The Hindu that the bins would be distributed by the end of next week. The bins had been stocked and were ready for distribution.
Mr. Kumar said the civic body conducted a meeting with representatives of people and non-government organisations (NGOs) on January 30 to create awareness among residents to make this move a success.
Manjunath R. Shetty, Environment Engineer at the corporation, told The Hindu that the bins were of green and yellow colours. The green ones were for storing organic waste and the yellow ones for dry waste. Each house in the two wards would get two bins of 10 litre capacity.
In addition, the stock had 600 bins, 300 each in the two colours, of 120 litre capacity and 50 bins, 25 each, of 240 litre capacity. Each apartment or commercial establishment would be issued two bins of separate colours depending on the quantity of waste generated by it, Mr. Shetty said.
He said the organic waste collected would be used for producing methane gas at the “Nisargaruna” bio-methanation plant of the civic body at Urwa Market. The dry waste would be transported to the sanitary landfill site at Pachchanady.
The civic body would create awareness on segregating the waste before distributing the bins to people. This would be done by distributing pamphlets and making announcements. He said the move of the corporation would not succeed unless people cooperated.
Ranganath C. Kini, councillor, court ward, said if the drive was to become a success it might require some volunteers. Another meeting would be held next week to finalise the role of people’s volunteers in the drive.
Mr. Kini said he had attended meetings of residents’ welfare associations of apartments and convinced them to segregate the waste before handing them over to the corporation. There was positive response from them, he said.
