Chennai city is dotted with local bodies, nearly all of whom are struggling to implement appropriate solid waste management practices.
Many local bodies embarked on novel methods to collect and dispose waste generated in homes, but they seem to be losing out in the big battle with garbage. At the Visweswarapuram garbage dumping yard of Pammal Municipality, for instance, waste is burned regularly.
Recording his experience in Friends of Chennai, T. Sivasankaran, a resident says: “People living near Thiruneermalai fall sick due to the air pollution caused by burning of plastic garbage, hospital and industrial waste. In this yard, the municipality is burning the garbage, including plastic waste.”
Adding to the pollution are crushers that generate a lot of dust. He wants the government to intervene and stop the burning of wastes immediately. Pammal Municipality has been implementing solid waste management programmes for the past two decades now. Officials of Municipal Administration said that of the average collection of 1,000 tonnes of garbage per month from 16 wards, only about 10 per cent is recovered as recyclables. A new machine Swatch-1 has been installed at the resource recovery centre which works on the magnetic thermal decomposition process to reduce the inert particles.
Residents also said they had complained to the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board to put an end to the menace caused by the burning of garbage. Municipal officials are however confident that once the waste-to-energy project at Venkatamangalam is commissioned, the problems would be resolved.
They said the administration was trying its best to ensure that fires did not break out at the garbage yard to prevent smoke billowing from there and affecting the health of residents and motorists.
Sources in TNPCB said they had written to the municipality pointing out complaints from residents. “We have asked them not to burn garbage, but to implement the composting programme properly,” the source said.
Environmentalists said that many municipalities outside the city limits continued to burn garbage despite municipal solid waste rules insisting on source segregation and safe landfills for the non-recyclable waste.
The ‘zero waste centre’ – established on a public private partnership model to create organic manure from kitchen waste had attracted the attention of State governments across the country. However, the garbage dumping yard continues to pose problems as in similar facilities in other local bodies in the city’s suburbs, officials in the department say.
(Additional reporting by Deepa H. Ramakrishnan)
