The process of turning wet wastes into compost will no longer be laborious and time-consuming.
For, the city corporation along with engineers has created a prototype to quicken the process of turning west wastes into compost within a day without foul odour and flies menace. The civic body has set up the equipment at Bharathi Park and is running it on a pilot basis.
For over a year now, we wanted to formulate an idea to automate and simplify the compost process, a corporation source said. In order to overcome the difficulties that are being faced in the existing process, we had started designing a prototype during the lockdown period, the source said.
Unlike the previous method in which wet wastes would be allowed to undergo anaerobic decomposition for weeks together, we have designed a machine on trial-and-error basis to quicken the process, the source said.
A private company – Shree Bommu industries – has come forward to manufacture it. The equipment has been put to test for the past two months.
"As soon as the waste is unloaded, it will be sent to a shredder using a conveyor belt where it will be shredded into small pieces. The shredded pieces will be sent to a dewatering machine where 50% of the liquid will be filtered and sent through a pipe to the biogas plant. The sludge would be sent to the dryer where 40% of the remaining moisture would be evaporated and the dried waste will be sent into a pulverizer to powder it," he explained.
In the traditional method, it would take at least 40 days to get the compost. But in the new method, the compost will be obtained within a day. Similarly, in the place of 15 workers, just two or three could take care of the centre, he said. "As the process is quickened, the centre will have no foul odour or menace of flies. Human intervention could be eliminated to a larger extent," he added.
In the place of 150X50 feet of land, all we required is just 25x25 feet to set up the equipment, he said. For every five tonnes of wet waste, 500kg of compost is obtained.
"Now, we are working on to improvise the equipment by analyzing its shortfall. In the improvised version, we have decided to pulverize the waste in the beginning instead of shredding it in the beginning and grinding in the end of the process," he explained.
The source said the corporation is planning to set up the equipment at 10 of its micro-composting centres within a few months in the next stage.