The Times of India 01.02.2010

Dealing with unsegregated waste

Julie Mariappan, TNN, 1 February 2010, 01:11am IST

CHENNAI: The residents of Perungudi and Kodungaiyur, where the notified dumping grounds of the Chennai Corporation are overflowing with tonnes of unsegregated waste, are sure to be pleased with the plans to decentralise solid waste management (SWM) practices in the soon-to-come-about Greater Chennai.

The two areas, previously in the suburbs, will soon be part of the Chennai Corporation that will sprawl over 426 sq km. It is now spread over 174 sq km. As part of the government’s plan to extend the city limits to better civic infrastructure, the corporation sent a three-page questionnaire to the heads of the newly-included areas — 25 panchayats, eight town panchayats and nine municipalities in Tiruvallur and Kancheepuram districts — for information on the ‘fine points’ of solid waste management there, informed sources say.

The questions posed include waste generated per day, availability of landfill sites, number of men and machinery, transfer stations, proposals such as identifying future dumpsites, operations of sanitary landfill site, budget allotment for SWM, door-to-door operations, bio-metric attendance, night conservancy, segregation of waste at source and welfare measures for conservancy staff.

“SWM rules will be implemented in the extended areas for zero waste management,” said a senior official. The authorities are mulling over whether to enter into a Public Private Partnership (PPP) or seek government support to implement the projects.

The corporation, at present, has a tie-up with ITC Ltd. to buy recyclable waste from residents of Anna Nagar. Every month, three wards of Kilpauk zone are added. It is hoped that the entire zone will be covered by March. Later, Saidapet and Nungambakkam zones will be covered. “The same goes for the suburbs that will form part of Greater Chennai,” the official said.

Every day, the notified grounds in Perungudi and Kodungaiyur receive at least 1,800 tonnes of unsegregated waste each, collected from five zones in north and south Chennai. With the threat to the environment being highlighted, locals have been holding protests, including blocking conservancy vehicles. In vain. The dumping continues.

When the city’s limits are extended, the corporation would have to face the additional challenges of tackling dumping of waste in an unregulated manner in the suburbs as well. Although most panchayats and municipalities have an independent mechanism in place for waste disposal, most areas have not been able to evolve an efficient system. In Perungudi, residents have been waging a legal battle against the corporation to get rid of the garbage from the yard. “After these areas become part of Greater Chennai, we will not allow waste from the suburban areas to reach the Perungudi yard,” says K Periasamy of Thoraipakkam. The locals accuse officials of not meeting the Union environment ministry’s Municipal Solid Waste (Management and Land Filling) Rules, 2000.

There has been little progress on the proposed integrated solid waste management programme announced by the corporation two years ago. “It still remains on paper, except that the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board (TNPCB) has been approached for clearance. The State Environment Impact Assessment Authority has been sitting on the file for months now,” sources say.

The Times of India 01.02.2010

Waterbodies are currently the dumpyards in suburbs

D Madhavan, TNN, 1 February 2010, 01:13am IST

CHENNAI: Recently, a team of senior Kancheepuram district officials inspected waterbodies along the 200-ft Pallavaram-Thoraipakkam Radial Road and were shocked to see that almost one-fourth of the ‘Periya Eri’ (big lake) in Ganapathipuram of Pallavaram municipality was levelled with garbage.

With smoke from the continuously-burning mounds of garbage on the bank of the lake blanketing the air, the damage to the environment is considerable. The practice in Ganapathipuram, the lone site available for the municipality to dump the nearly 80 tonnes of garbage generated every day, has been in existence since Independence. Result: the death of a lake.

The Pallavaram municipality is not the only one in the suburbs dumping garbage in waterbodies. Almost all the local bodies, both rural and urban, are guilty of this practice.

Many local bodies are soon to be merged in the expanded Chennai Corporation and the need for sound solid waste management practices is imperative. The local bodies’ inability to segregate waste at source, a shortage of landfill sites and poor support from the government — all contribute to the practice of garbage dumped near waterbodies. “The growing population in the suburbs has led to an acute shortage of land and waterbodies form a convienent place to dispose waste,” a few Pallavaram municipality officials said.

There are over 1,000 waterbodies in Kancheepuram district, including over 300 in Tambaram, Sholinganallur and Alandur taluks. Thirty of these are major lakes covering a total of around 3,000 acres. The six municipalities, 13 town panchayats and 25 village panchayats in Chennai’s southern suburbs have a population of over 30 lakh. The floating population also contributes a fair amount of waste. Every day, on an average, a municipality generates around 70 tonnes of waste, a town panchayat 10 tonnes and a village panchayat one tonne.

While a few local bodies such as the Mudichur village panchayat and the Sholinganallur and Kundrathur town panchayats have modern compost yards where kitchen waste is converted into manure and sold to residents, most others use waterbodies. “A sound solid waste management project involves segegrating waste into bio and non-biodegradable categories at source and disposing it in an environment-friendly way. Dedicated manpower can help achieve it,” says Shiva T Krishnamoorthy, project leader of Hand-in-Hand, an NGO that specialises in solid waste management. At present, garbage collection and disposal in the municipalities is being taken care of by the Sanitary Departments concerned, who are ill-equipped to tackle the huge amounts of garbage generated. In the town panchayats, staff on general duty look after the task while members of the Total Sanitation Campaign in the St. Thomas Mount Panchayat Union monitor handling of garbage in the village panchayats.

The lack of suitable landfill sites combined with an acute fund crunch, has made it difficult for several village panchayats to go in for composting kitchen waste. To ease the strain on the dumping yards in many areas, the concept of integrated compost yards was mooted a few years ago but little progress seems to have been made in this direction.

“Implementing solid waste management projects in local bodies will be challenge for the expanded Chennai Corporation sincle it will have to handle more garbage in a limited space,” says R Selvam of Okkiyan-Thoraipakkam.