Goa creates hundreds of tonnes of garbage every day. Unfortunately, the state’s garbage management system is non-existent, leading to litter all over the state, which doesn’t bode well for residents and the tourism industry. This need not be so if Goa learns lessons from best practices elsewhere in India, especially two great examples in Andhra Pradesh and one in Kochi
In 2004, the town of Suryapet , three hours east ofHyderabad, became India’s firstdustbin-free and dumping-free city in India. Its Commissioner, S A KhadarSaheb, achieved this in 18 months without any financial help from Centre orState, no local NGO support and no external waste-processing or landfill site.Simply by an intensive drive to collect and transport dry waste separately, hecould manage the waste of his 103,000 residents on a half-acre of inner-cityland. In addition, he earned the city Rs 40,000 a month through sale ofcompost, and Rs 55,000 a month from sale of sorted dry recyclables.
He recruited eight self-help groups for door-to-doorcollection in tractors. These new tractors were bought with bank loans, andrepayment guaranteed by the city through deductions from the rental paid forthe SHG’s collection services. After five years, the tractors are fully ownedby them. The tractors stop at every 5-7 houses along a street, and residentscome up to it with their kitchen waste. Dry waste should ideally be collectedonly once a week, as retaining it separately is nuisance free. This food wasteis unloaded at the half acre site for stack composting. Undisturbed, withoutneed for turning, this becomes compost in about 4 months. Suryapet built alarge shed with partitions along the walls for storing different grades of drywaste: rigid and thin plastic, paper, rubber, metals, wood. Sorting was done byemploying eight traditional waste-pickers fulltime for foot-baling and stackingof different grades of waste. Scrap dealers and kabadiwalas eagerly picked upthis ready-to-transport dry waste to different recycling-factory customers.Inert waste consisting of debris, construction and demolition (C & D)waste, road dust and drain silt was cleared in the afternoons. Stretches ofdrain were allotted per person, to empty drain silt directly into wheely-binspulled along their stretch and unloaded immediately into a separate municipalvehicle.
B Janardhan Reddy, the Director Municipal Administration(CDMA) of AP has started a policy of holding his regional meetings only in thedumping ground of one town or another. Obviously, this triggered a cleanupdrive at the selected dump. Shaikh Subhani, the Commissioner of Saluru, in thefar NE corner of coastal Andhra, was so inspired by this that he pushed all hisrandomly-dumped waste into a perimeter bund for later treatment and sieving,converted the central area to a park, and celebrated his daughter’s weddingthere, surely a global first!
Khadar Saheb, now JtDirector DMA, pulled off another miracle in Warangal last October, with fullsupport from the CDMA and visible leadership from the young new CommissionerVivek Yadav of Warangal, a town of 600,000. Together with four freelancesolid-waste-management (SWM) consultants, they dreamed up a way to make SWMcompliance as exciting as an IPL 20-20 cricket match, through a Clean CitiesChampionship Campaign. The result: in just one week, this typical town ofoverflowing cement-ring waste-bins on roadsides became clean and bin-free, with100% door-to-door collection of 80% fully-segregated waste in pushcarts.
How was this one-week city transformation done, with just 20days of pre-launch planning and publicity? www.cleancitieschampionship.orgdescribes the awareness drives, practical training, process and outcomes anduploads daily waste-collection data. Google street-maps of the city were usedto divide the entire residential area into equal routes of 400 houses, eachwith competing teams of an S.I. (Sanitation Inspector), route-manager withpushcart and two sanitation staff to collect discards from homes and also cleantheir streets and drains. 373 such teams competed for individual cash awards,including 260 home teams from Warangal itself and the rest from 59 otherregional towns supported by local workers. They were monitored by NCCvolunteers for punctuality, collection efficiency, completeness of segregationand area cleanliness. As door-to-door waste went into pushcarts, roadside ringbins became progressively empty and daily a few were removed. In 7 days, 266ring bins and 48 dumper bins and 1200 open dump spots were removed and replacedby potted plants. A debris-clearance drive left all roads cleaner and wider.106 tons of dry waste went to a large shed for sorting and auction, and somewet waste went for stack and vermi-composting. Thus 70% of waste was divertedfrom the disposal ground. Old waste lying there was formed into windrows forweekly turning. A unique new portable garbage segregation machine from JKEngineering Malegaon, fed with semi-dry old waste, instantly splits it intothree clean fractions: dust-free thin-plastic fragments saleable at Rs 12 a kg,a clean fine organic fraction useful for city greening, and clean gravel/grituseful for improving internal roads there. Within a year, this machine mayclear the entire site of old waste.
The CCC team, delighted with its success, has offered itsservices to any city that will pay for such a drive on a per-capita basis. Goais such a small state that engaging this experienced team for a month of effortand a competition between local towns and villages can potentially clean up theentire state in just one week!
Meanwhile, Goa’s hotel industry can benefit from a visit toKochi, where the Meridian Hotel with 223 double rooms manages its entire wetwaste and garden waste onsite in a large garden shed with 22 composting biobinsof 40 kg capacity each. CREDAI has made 300 Kochi high-rises zero-waste just by100% collection of unmixed wet waste by installing terrace bio-bins, therebydiverting 30 tons a day of waste from 30,000 households (150,000 persons, thesize of a small town). This is spreading to many other Kerala towns. Seewww.cleancity.in and a Youtube video of the same name. Dry waste is alsocollected separately and recyclables are sold. Unwanted plastics (thermocole,multifilm sachets) are centrally shredded for use in “plastic roads” with 2-3times better life than normal asphalt roads. One basin of shredded plastics issprinkled onto heated stones and mixed for just 30 seconds before molten tar(bitumen) is added as usual for normal mixing. This process can be used in bothcentralised hot-mix plants and mini-hotmix equipment. The Central PollutionControl Board has issued two downloadable guidelines on this : PROBES/101/2005-06 describes how to use the plasticand PROBES/122/2008-09 compares the life of “plastic roads” with normal bitumenroads, based on studies of the 1200 km of such roads laid down in all districtsof Tamil Nadu in 2004.
Goa should make this compulsory state policy for all roadsas Himachal Pradesh has done. With rising diesel prices, a new low-temperatureP2F (Plastics To Fuel) process is becoming so viable now that major scrapdealers have begun investing in such equipment. If an Amul milk-collection typemodel is adopted in Goa, with persons invited to bring in waste plastics forshredding and depolymerising and taking back some diesel-substitute fuel (orits cash equivalent) in return, the countryside can soon be free of windblownplastic litter. A cap on subsidized gas cylinders is increasing the popularityof two other innovations of the CREDAI Clean City program at Kochi.Barrel-sized home biogas units can accept the food waste of one bungalow andgive 2-4 hours of cooking gas daily. A similar biogas unit installed in aseptic tank can also produce cooking gas while reducing the need for sludgeremoval.
All these measures are now necessary and will become anational norm because of the countrywide neglect and indiscriminate opendumping of mixed waste at suburban sites which were meant for stabilizing andcomposting of wet food wastes. Goa is already facing preventive protests byvillagers asking towns to manage their waste within their own city limits.Villages around Trivandrum and
Bangalore have recently closed down the open dumpsites oftheir urban neighbours by long-overdue protests against urban arrogance andwillful pollution, leading to piles of waste in the streets. Bangalore has hadto respond by a notification requiring daily collection of only wet waste,refusal of mixed waste and once-weekly collection of dry waste at wardwisecentres.
Chhattisgarh has just resolved to become India’s firstkerosene-lighting-free State by distributing portable solar LED lanterns to13.5 lac tribal families and study lights to 16 lac students.
By the very simple solution of collecting and transportingunmixed wet (food) wastes and dry (recyclable) wastes, every Goan can easilyhelp their lovely little land to become India’s first landfill-free state if itis really serious about segregation and decentralised waste treatment. Butstrong administrative will is a necessary first condition.
A student ofchemistry and botany, an engineer with a degree in ceramics from MIT in Boston,USA, Almitra H Patel had worked for six years in R & D and then for 26years headed a family business supplying ceramic mixes and monolithicrefractories.
But her calling came when she was anointed Member, SupremeCourt Committee for Solid Waste Management for Class 1 cities. Her personalmission has been to force all of India's 300 major cities to stop the opendumping of garbage and adopt hygienic eco-friendly practices for all aspects ofUrban Solid Waste Management (SWM). No wonder then that her inputs gottranslated into National Policy for Urban SWM and Notification of Municipal SWMRules to protect, preserve and improve our urban and peri-urban environment and the health and well-being of 40 million Indians
