For over 30 years, S. James, a conservancy worker with the Poonamallee Municipality, has been collecting garbage from houses riding a tricycle.
He will soon be relieved of this arduous labour. The fifty-five-year-old conservancy worker will continue collecting garbage going from door to door, but would be driving a battery-operated vehicle.
Poonamallee Municipality is replacing its 108 tricycles with battery-operated vehicles. Already, 38 tricycles have been replaced; and the rest of the tricycles will be, in the coming months.
“The idea of utilising battery-operated vehicles was conceived by the Commissionerate of Municipal Administration. A conservancy staff riding a tricycle now covers only 250 households every day; by driving a battery-operated vehicle he can cover 400 households every day. A sum of Rs 8.29 lakhs has been allocated for this exercise. Each battery-operated vehicle can run for six hours covering a distance of 50 km,” says V. Muthukumar, Chief Engineer, Poonamallee Municipality. At present, around 21 metric tonnes of garbage are generated from around 17,000 households in the Poonamallee Municipality. Of the 21 metric tonnes of garbage, 10.5 metric tonnes is biodegradable waste and the rest is non-biodegradable waste which is sent to a cement factory.
In the new scheme of things, the battery-operated vehicles will be used to transport the 10.5 metric tonnes of biodegradable waste from Poonamalle Municipality to the compost units at Nanbargal Nagar, Sundar Nagar, Parivakkam and a few more localities. “The environment-friendly vehicles are already in operation in Pammal, Pallavaram and Tambaram municipalities. But there is a difference between the battery-operated vehicles used by these municipalities and the ones by the Poonamallee Municipality. The vehicles used by Poonamallee Municipality belongs to the closed-type category and garbage will not get spilled on to the roads,” says the Municipality official.
