Plastic waste may continue to choke Kochi as a comprehensive plastic waste management system eludes the city.
The piled-up plastic on the Brahmapuram campus had caught fire on Tuesday and required considerable efforts on the part of the Fire and Rescue Services officials to douse it.
The city administrations are now pinning their hopes on scientific capping of waste to clear the over 70,000 tonnes of plastic waste dumped at the solid waste treatment plant at Brahmapuram. Even the scientific capping programme may take some time to materialise as it requires clearance from agencies such as the Suchitwa Mission, according to civic administrators.
A ₹1-crore project for capping waste is awaiting clearance from the Suchitwa Mission in the first phase. The Kochi Corporation has also earmarked ₹4.5 crore for clearing the entire waste collected on the 6.5-acre campus.
The second phase of the scientific capping project will be taken up during the next fiscal.
Earlier, the civic body had created two sanitary landfill sites of 50 cents each and cleared a considerable quantity of waste collected there. The Corporation has proposed the utilisation of the same sites for further capping of the waste, according to authorities.
It is estimated that around 145 tonnes of plastic waste reaches the Brahmapuram site every day from the city besides the nearly 250 tonnes of food waste collected from homes and eateries. On a monthly average, 100 tonnes of clean plastic is sold from there. One kg of clean plastic fetched the civic body ₹1.50, said V. K. Minimol, chairperson of the health standing committee of the Kochi Corporation.
During the 2017-18 fiscal, the civic body sold 112 tonnes of shredded plastic, which is used along with bitumen for making roads. That time, the civic body got ₹4 lakh as sales proceeds. No scientific management system, except the capping, was in force in the local bodies of the State and Kochi was no exception, she added.
At the same time, Ms. Minimol claimed that Kochi led the way in the shredding of plastic waste. Plastic granules created from shredding the waste is sold mostly to the Public Works Department. Earlier, the department had approved the granules as material to be used for laying roads.
