Bio-mining units at Dhapa to bring down waste pile-up
Kolkata: The state government is coming up with bio-mining facilities at Dhapa to reduce the piling of wastes at the land fill site.
State Urban Development and Municipal Affairs minister Firhad Hakim said on Saturday that gradually the government will come up with a factory adjacent to the landfill site at Dhapa where the waste would be segregated into organic and inorganic substances. While the organic waste would be turned into compost and can be used as soil conditioner for agricultural activities, the inorganic material found in the waste such as plastics, rubber, cloth, leather, wood and glass items would be used by the cement industry .
"The process will take time but we will put up an infrastructure when there will be minimum amount of waste piling up at Dhapa," Hakim reiterated.
In Bengal, the municipal waste generation stands at 14,000 metric tonne per day while KMC alone handles 4,500 metric tonne per day the majority of which is dumped at Dhapa on a daily basis.
According to sources in the Solid Waste Management department of the KMC, two heaps of garbage looking similar to hills have come up at Dhapa. One is spanned over an area of 12 acre while the other is 60 acre. The 12 acre portion has already been sealed and KMC has stopped dumping of waste there. But the one spanning 60 acre with huge quantities of waste piling is a major challenge on the part of the KMC. It may be mentioned that Kolkata Municipal Commissioner Khalil Ahmed has already constituted a 10-member committee led by Special Commissioner of KMC and with Jadavpur University professor Amit Dutta to come up with suggestions and plans on how to move towards minimising the gathering of municipal wastes at Dhapa.
"We have floated two tenders — one for waste segregation and recycling at Dhapa and another for Mollar Bheri where wastes of Bidhannagar, parts of Kolkata, New Town and Nabadiganta area are dumped," said a senior official of the state Municipal Affairs department.
The National Green Tribunal (NGT) has recently imposed a penalty of Rs 2 crore to Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation for its lackadaisical attitude in handling solid wastes. A Korean company in the coming week will make a presentation about scientific waste disposal of solid waste at the office of the Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority. It may be mentioned that open landfill sites like Dhapa and Mollar Bheri are susceptible to fires. The smoke emitting from the waste contains carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, sulphur oxides and nitrogen oxides. It is also rich in PM 2.5 and PM10, tiny pollutants that enter the deepest crevices of the lungs and can trigger a host of respiratory diseases.
