Plans to revive garbage segregation concept

By A Staff Reporter

It’s that time of the year when the Flame of the Forest is ablaze – (Photograph by Octavious Bunshaw).

With our Corporation likely to go to the polls in the next six months, the present administration is suddenly moving into overdrive as far as several long pending initiatives are concerned. The fact that the elections to the State Legislature saw several seats in the city going to the Opposition may also be a reason for this urgency. One of the ideas now being given an airing is the plan to get our citizens to sort their garbage at source. This is not a new development and it must be said that in all its previous outings it failed, chiefly because there was no proper implementation. This time, however, it may succeed.

Our optimism is due to the fact that there appears to be a route map in place for segregation. The Corporation is mulling over doing away with the green bins in the street corners – the local garbage collection point where residents presently deposit their rubbish and from where the conservancy agency collects it all, twice a day. The idea is to now encourage each household to segregate its waste at source. With more than 80 per cent of the city’s rubbish being organic, separating it out will automatically reduce the quantum of garbage being sent to landfills. It must be pointed out here that some residential localities in South Chennai have already implemented this on a voluntary basis. The inorganic waste in these areas is collected and then a network of rag pickers and scrap dealers are brought into the picture to further sort out this waste. The recyclable components are sold off and it is only the rest that make their way to the landfill. The Corporation plans to get this scheme operational across the city, one ward at a time.

Chennai has thus far had no success with such schemes. The city has largely depended on carting away its garbage to places in the outskirts and in the past several years this has come to mean two landfills – at Kodungaiyur and Perungudi. These were once far-away spots with no habitation in the vicinity but are now densely populated residential areas. The locals have been protesting ceaselessly against the indiscriminate dumping and, worse, the burning of garbage. The matter went to the Courts, which ruled that the landfills had to be closed and an alternate scheme for waste disposal had to be finalised. The Corporation has had no option but to act quickly.

Interestingly, the present administration has made a complete shift in its thinking in the last five years. When newly elected, it came up with the idea of building large garbage storage bins at street corners that could hold several days of garbage before being carted away. The scheme was a complete failure – garbage piling up resulted in all kinds of other problems, the bins themselves were to put to other not-so-civic uses, and many collapsed owing to faulty construction. From there to a plan where no garbage will accumulate at street corners and each household or unit will be responsible for its rubbish and its segregation is a diametric change.

The new scheme will succeed provided the citizenry reacts in a responsible fashion. Much will depend on how the Corporation workers and conservancy officers educate and interact with the public. A lot will also hinge on how quickly the Corporation can organise the presently informal sector of rag pickers and scrap dealers into a proper network. Those in charge of conservancy will also need to step up the frequency of garbage collection, vastly reduced though the quantity may be. Can our Corporation do all this?

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