Tamil Nadu - Coimbatore   

It's all rubbish once again

Pankaja Srinivasan

Solid waste management can be a possibility if the people will it

Coimbatore: A resident of a housing complex and a university campus have some ideas on making Coimbatore cleaner. It needs a little thought, some amount of co-operation from the municipal authorities and free will to translate the ideas into reality.

One of the residents of the Sreevatsa Apartments, Manisundar, who is also keen to see effective garbage management systems come into play in the city, has this to say. "To make garbage disposal a feasible option, one has to work backwards. The first thing any locality or apartment complex has to do is identify a yard where they can compost the garbage.

The garbage should either come segregated at source and then come here, or if need be (like they do it at Parsns, Nanjundapuram), the segregation can be done at the yard itself by people especially employed for the job."

Efforts to segregate garbage at source have often come to nought as the residents have watched in infuriation as their carefully segregated garbage has all been mixed up once again and dumped into a single truck.

Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham manages its waste with great effect. At the university campus separate bins have been provided for organic and inorganic waste. The latter is segregated and recycled. The nearly half a tonne of food or organic waste that is generated everyday (from the many dining halls and homes) is collected and layered in trenches dug between rows of coconut trees. Effective Microbes (EM) is added and the waste decomposes in the soil and enriches it.

Nothing is impossible. The Pune Municipal Corporation has successfully put into place a workable solid waste management system. Why can't Coimbatore? All it needs is some awareness, co-operation from the people and a will to work things out. If hotels, hospitals, defence establishments, college, school and university campuses, shops and industries can take the lead and start looking at solid waste management as an essential part of their existence, then Coimbatore will be a much cleaner place to live in.

Incidentally, there is a government ruling that makes it compulsory for all institutions to dispose of their wastes responsibly. These set of rules are called the Municipal Solid Wastes (Management and Handling) Rules, 2000. They apply to every municipal authority responsible for collection, segregation, storage, transportation, processing and disposal of municipal solid wastes. But for that to happen, each one of us in Coimbatore has to make up our minds to be responsible for the waste we create.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

Third gender fights for a space to call their own
It's all rubbish once again
Soofiya Maudhany surrenders before Coimbatore court
Residents observe fast demanding re-laying of Sundakkamuthur road
South African SSIs keen on technology transfer
Online education programme begins in Coimbatore
Kural thanks Government
Study on problems faced by the disabled
CII welcomes budget announcements
More branches of BoB planned
What is Effective Microbes?
Around the City
In Coimbatore Today
Reader's Mail

Copyright © 2006, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu