Come July 1, 70 per cent of the rubbish generated in the city would be converted into manure, the sale of which would also fetch some extra revenue for the civic body.
This is consequent to the decision of the Mangalore City Corporation to award a private company the contract of operating and maintaining the compost plant and sanitary landfill site at Pachchanady from next month.
The company is expected to install two more machines – one of them by July-end – for pre-composting segregation in addition to the existing 120 tonne-capacity a day processing machine already in use. According to an agreement signed with the company on May 29 not more than 30 per cent of the waste generated a day should be dumped in the landfill site. The source said that the company had its own arrangements for marketing compost.
Thrust
The focus would be on converting more waste in to manure by reducing the quantity of rubbish to be dumped into the landfill site.
Manjunath R Shetty, Environment Engineer at the city corporation, is quite optimistic about the difference that the new arrangement would make. He said that the corporation was managing the compost plant and sanitary landfill site on ad-hoc basis with 11 hired workers. Only a part of the 200 tonnes of solid waste generated in the city is being turned into manure. Another part of it is consumed by the vermi-compost unit.
At present both the composting plant and the dumping site are being managed by the civic body after they were built by a government body and handed over to the corporation under a project five years ago.
Srikant Rao, Commissioner in-charge of the MCC, told The Hindu that Unique Waste Processing Company Ltd., Delhi would operate and maintain them for the next six years.
He said that the company is a joint venture of IL&FS Environmental Infrastructure and Services Ltd. & S. S. Khilari, Delhi which has been awarded the contract by the civic body with the due approval from the State government.
Mr. Shetty said that the company should credit to the civic body 50 per cent of the profit it earned from the sale of manure in a year.
The operation and maintenance is part of the three-package solid waste management scheme of the corporation approved by the government last year.
The Delhi-based company had quoted Rs. 238 a tonne for operation and maintenance. The cost estimated by the MCC was Rs. 248 a tonne. In this case, the company quoted about four per cent lower than the original estimation.
The other two packages approved by the government in December last were collection and transportation of solid waste from 60 wards divided as south and north zones. Anthony Waste Handling Cell Pvt. Ltd. Mumbai has bagged the contract of two packages. It is yet to take over the packages.
