Ever wondered what happens after you chuck your garbage in any of the 13,000 bins on the street?
Where does it go and how does it travel? Check the timeline (in infographics).
After signing in digitally at the ward office in Zone V at 6 a.m., sanitary worker Roopavathi starts sweeping interior streets by 7 a.m. She sweeps the waste into piles left at street corners, and soon workers with tricycles collect these piles of garbage and dump them into collection bins.
Massive compactors turn up for kerbside collection after 7 a.m., and empty the contents of the bins into their hold-area. Often, you know a compactor has been in the area, as it leaves a trail of garbage in its path, not to mention the stench.
The compactor takes the garbage to the nearby transfer station (roughly one per zone). Garbage trucks make four or five trips to transfer waste from the transfer station to the dumping yards.
Most of the 4,800-odd tonnes of waste generated from the 33,000 streets in Chennai reach 11 transfer stations by 11 a.m. every day, before being transferred by trucks to dumping yards in Kodungaiyur or Perungudi. No processing is done, anywhere.
Untreated garbage continues to affect the areas adjoining the dumping yards. Even as some residents have initiated decentralised waste management in their neighbourhoods, using wet waste for composting, source segregation is conspicuous by its absence in most of the 15 zones.
“Garbage is not treated. We take five hours to take the untreated garbage from the transfer station to the dumping yard. Most of the garbage collected on the streets at 11 a.m. reaches the dumping yard by 4 p.m.,” says an official.
The untreated garbage dumps in Perungudi and Kodungaiyur continue to offer a mirage of livelihood to scores of ragpickers, mostly children, whose health is impacted negatively by the work they do.
Garbage from market areas such as Koyambedu, however, reaches a biogas plant for generation of power. “A new engine from the Czech Republic began operations a few weeks ago. We have sent 60,000 units to the power grid. The proposal is to increase the amount of waste from 20 to 30 tonnes. More hotels are likely to send waste to the biogas plant,” says Thirugnana Sambandan, project director of Ramky, one of the agencies authorised to carry out conservancy in the city.
An NGO has started segregating waste from the Marina beach recently. There are other projects that attempt to make use of the waste instead of just dumping it: converting plastic into diesel at factories located in suburbs such as Alathur; recycling paper in modern plants; producing methane for street lighting from biodegradable waste; generating biogas from cattle dung in slaughterhouses; making tiles from recycled construction debris; shipping of construction debris; and manufacture of animal feed using poultry waste.
Some of the issues that even officials of the civic body acknowledge include the lack of concrete recycling or treating solutions for a bulk of the solid waste generated in the city, the inability of various agencies to coordinate among themselves for sweeping and collection and, as sanitary workers point out, the lack of manpower and advanced equipment for conservancy operations.
Year 2015 could mark the end of a few aspects of the current system of garbage disposal as the Chennai Corporation has planned new initiatives to modify the ineffective waste management process.
Over 9,000 sanitary workers on the rolls of the Chennai Corporation seem to be concerned, as it may involve changes to their lives.
Vacant posts are likely to remain unfilled, and the existing workers shifted to other zones, considering there are plans to privatise conservancy operations in 12 zones.
