In the south-east corner of its old dump yard in Kavundampalayam (eru company) a Coimbatore Corporation team is ready at the micro compost centre (MCC) there to receive the wet waste collected from Wards 9, 10 and 11.
The Corporation has deployed the vehicles to collect only wet, degradable waste from a few localities in the three wards as a pilot project aimed at encouraging people to segregate waste and processing wet waste separately, that too in a decentralised manner in the MCCs.
As the vehicles enter the MCCand unload the waste, a newly-installed conveyor belt takes the waste to one of the 14 tanks, where workers spread it over to a bed.
In adjacent tanks, waste dumped in the past slowly lose weight and volume as they turn into compost. To hasten the process, the workers there spread coir pith inoculated with microbes and spray a concoction of curd, jaggery dissolved in water, etc.
In another adjacent tank, a few hens move around the tank to feed on maggots, a fly control measure the Corporation has introduced.
This was a part of the experimentation process that the Corporation tried to evolve to set a standard operating procedure for the 69 MCCs that it proposed to establish in various parts of the city, Commissioner Sravan Kumar Jatavath told journalists a few days ago.
Of the 69 MCCs, the Corporation had completed 11 – in Onapalayam, R.S. Puram farmers’ market (uzhavar santhai), West Zone office, Bharthi Park, CMC Colony, Variety Hall Road, Chokkampudur and a few other places, said an officer, adding that a few of these would handle one tonne waste a day and others five tonnes.
Of the remaining 58, the Corporation had delayed construction in six locations due to opposition from residents and legal hurdles. It had taken up construction in 28 locations and ready to float tenders once again for the rest, the officer added.
For the 69 MCCs, the Corporation is spending around ₹40 crore, drawn from the Central Government-funded Smart Cities Mission.
Mr. Jatavath had said that the 69 MCCs would have the capacity to process around 300 tonne wet waste and thereby help the Corporation minimise and finally stop the open dumping in its Vellalore yard.
The Corporation submitted this MCC plan to the State Monitoring Committee of National Green Tribunal for Solid Waste Management with the assurance that it would soon stop open dumping of waste. The committee held a meeting in the city on August 9.
The ₹40 crore investment in MCCs and the assurance to the committee based on the investment is the latest in a series of measures the Corporation had taken, starting from the ₹100 crore it spent about a decade ago under the then Central Government scheme, Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Mission.
The Corporation established three transit stations at Ganapathy, Peelamedu and Ukkadam and equipped its workers with pushcarts to collect waste door-to-door and bought vehicles to transfer waste from bins on road to the transit stations and from there to the Vellalore yard.
Thereafter the Corporation experimented with a few other measures and tweaked the waste collection process but with limited success as the city's streets continued to be littered with waste.
The complaint from the city’s residents about the Corporation’s waste management practices was that the conservancy workers were not collecting waste door-to-door and even if they handed over waste after segregation, the workers dumped the wet waste with the dry waste.
The workers’ grievance was that they were not finding adequate bins to dump the waste they collected.
The Corporation then introduced battery-powered vehicles to hasten the process of door-to-door waste collection but this new intervention did not last long as the drivers driving the vehicles complained that the pulling power of the motors was inadequate when they were loaded with waste.
To manage the dry, recyclable waste, the Corporation said it would collect the waste only once a week, on Wednesdays. But again the irregularity in implementing the system resulted in its failure, said a few field officers in the Corporation.
Meanwhile, the Corporation found some success in solid waste management in Ward 23 as an NGO, ICLEI, implemented the ‘Shunya’ or zero waste project, where door-to-door collection of waste resulted in no waste getting dumped on the road.
The Corporation was also able to remove bins on the streets as it collected all the waste door-to-door. But then the Corporation could not scale up the project.
Now, the Corporation has placed reliance on the decentralised waste collection and processing system using MCCs saying that this system will succeed as it has altered the fundamentals of waste collection.
Henceforth, waste collection would not be ward-based but MCC-based as the vehicles it would allot to each MCC would go around designated areas, which would be cutting across wards.
And, to ensure that each vehicle attached to the MCC covers all the households, the Corporation had introduced a vehicle tracking system. But this new system placing as much reliance on residents’ compliance to waste segregation as did the previous practices that had failed, therefore threatens to jeopardize the ₹40 crore investment. And, the Corporation not creating waste segregation awareness among residents only adds to the problem.
Denying the suggestion that the new system would also fail, the Corporation field level officer said this would not be the case as the driver-helper teams that collected waste would ensure segregation and identify houses that did not hand over waste for the Corporation to initiate penal action.
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