Two months after Principal Secretary in-charge of Dakshina Kannada set a six-month deadline to start collecting segregated solid waste from houses in the city, things do not seem to have picked up pace as yet.
All that the Mangalore City Corporation has done is to distribute some bins in a couple of wards (Mannagudda and Court wards) for segregation of waste, whereas there is no plan in place for the remaining areas.
Principal Secretary Bharatlal Meena had instructed the Commissioner of the MCC to achieve 80 per cent progress within six months and to emulate Moodbidri, where segregation of waste at point of origin, is a success.
According to the Municipal Solid Wastes (Management and Handling) Rules, 2000, of the Union government, it is obligatory on the part of all the municipal authorities to arrange for segregation of solid waste. The Karnataka High Court on September 10, 2012, had given directions for imposing fines on households that failed to segregate dry and wet garbage.
Manjunath R. Shetty, an Environment Engineer at the city corporation, lists the advantages of segregation thus: The quantity of solid waste reaching the compost plant will come down; so does its transportation cost and the labour cost at the plant. The operation and maintenance cost (now Rs. 238 per tonne) of solid waste segregating-cum-compost making machine will be reduced as it no longer needs to segregate garbage. The machine durability will go up. The quality of compost will be better. It will minimise dumping of inert waste in the landfill site, which can be used for more years.
He said that without mixing e-waste and plastic materials with organic waste at source, residents could directly sell them to scrap dealers to earn some money. Then its recycling was easy as there would be no dry waste in it.
The city produces 250 tonnes of trash a day. With this quantity, an acre of land was sufficient only for four months if solid waste is dumped without segregation. The civic body has 77.62 acres of land in Pachchanady for dumping.
‘Little progress’
The corporation has not even started collecting waste from doorsteps in all 60 wards – a prerequisite for successful segregation architecture, said G. Hanumantha Kamath, president, Nagarika Hitarakshana Samithi. A senior corporation official admitted that the municipal body had not done five per cent of its obligation in this regard, though legally it is bound to emerge into segregation regime.
