PANAJI
G oa’s capital city, which won the ‘Cleanest City’ award in the 50K to 2 lakh population category, turned the tables on the solid waste management conundrum with reforms the civic body initiated back in 2004-05 when it was hit by a crisis -- the Bombay High Court at Goa banning the CCP from using the Curca site to dump waste.
“This had led to a crisis and a mess of uncollected waste across the city. However, it forced a solution to the problem,” said Clinton Vaz, a waste management consultant the CCP took on board to help it with waste management at the time.
Vaz, who now manages his own waste management solutions company, said it was then that the ‘segregate at source’ mantra was introduced first, with massive efforts to create awareness, and then programmes were held to teach all of Panaji how to segregate their waste.
“It helped the CCP to manage its own waste in the city itself,” Vaz said, adding that the decentralised waste treatment and disposal sites across all zones in the city, with 150 compost units built in 2-3 years and 3-4 dry waste sorting centres, were key factors that helped manage the city’s solid waste in a crisis then.
He said former CCP Commissioner Sanjit Rodrigues, ex-councillor Patricia Pinto and senior CCP official Sachin Ambe were among those in the team who worked hard to lay the foundation of the solid waste management success.
Two decades later, Ambe now heads the CCP’s waste management effort, and the system has evolved into a relatively efficient 16-way waste segregation methodology.
Dry waste is segregated into biodegradable, non-biodegradable, sanitary and hazardous. It is then further broken down into 16 distinct types of waste for resource recovery through recycling and sorting processes at the Material Recovery Facility.
Ambe also credits the cooperation from the city’s residents and waste-generating businesses like hotels and restaurants, which he said is a crucial ingredient that enables the system to succeed.
The city produces approximately 21 tonnes of waste daily, of which nearly 14 tonnes is wet waste transported to the waste treatment plant facility at Saligao. The balance 40 per cent of the waste is dry, non-biodegradable waste, which is then segregated through the 16-way segregation process at the Material Recovery Facility.
