A private company managing the operation and maintenance of the compost plant of Mangalore City Corporation has completed the installation of a new garbage (solid waste) pre-sorting machine.
Its functioning would be tested on trial basis either on Thursday or Friday, Rajiv Joseph, project in-charge, Unique Waste Processing Company Ltd. told The Hindu . It is a subsidiary of IL & FS Infrastructure Development Corporation which bagged the contract and as part of it had to install the machine.
The machine would be put into use after making necessary changes, if required, following the trial run, he added.
The main advantage of the machine was that a magnetic separator in the machine would first pick up metal pieces from the municipal garbage fed to it. It had a system for piercing plastic bags to free waste in the “mouth-tied” plastic bags, he said.
An Environment Engineer at the corporation Manjunath R Shetty said that now, garbage collected from the city was first dumped into heaps at the plant yard for decomposing. It was transferred to a sorting machine (installed some years ago) after 35 to 45 days of decomposing for separating plastic materials and metals.
The existing machine did not have a system for piercing the plastic bags. In the decomposing process, waste in “mouth-tied” plastic bags was not decomposed causing foul smell. Mr. Shetty said that the new machine would be put into use for separating plastic bags, other plastic materials, metals etc. in the first stage itself before dumping the waste for 35 days to 45 days of decomposing.
He said that as “mouth-tied” plastic bags could be avoided in the decomposing process foul smell of garbage could be reduced drastically.
Mr. Joseph said that the new machine had the capacity to process 40 tonnes of garbage an hour.
The plant received about 210 tonnes of garbage a day in dry seasons and the weight went up by about 30 per cent in rainy season due to wet garbage.
Mr. Shetty said that now the corporation paid the company Rs. 238 per tonne for operation and maintenance of the plant.
