Garbage on streets, overflowing bins, and delayed removal are becoming a common sight thanks to the Coimbatore Corporation solid waste management (SWM), which is bursting at the seams.
The Corporation sources said the civic body had started facing problems in the recent past – for the last four to six months, to be specific – to remove the waste generated because of logistical issues. Though the old, perennial issues of waste generators not handing over segregated waste remained, the logistical issues had a cascading, direct effect on the streets.
The waste collected by pushcart workers and waste auto drivers went to bins and from there to transit stations through lorries. At the two transit stations – Peelamedu and Ukkadam – the operators compressed the waste to take it to Vellalore for processing.
Though the operation capacity of each of the plants was 200 tonnes a day – 20-25 tonnes an hour in an eight-hour shift, each had started handling at least 300 tonnes a day in the recent past.
More waste meant longer working hours, more lorries to deliver the waste, longer queues of lorries and that had led to a situation where the time taken for lorries to empty waste and return to wards to collect the next round of waste had increased.
Consequently, the lorries that usually made three or four sorties a day made one or two fewer, the sources said and explained that as lorries made fewer trips, the Corporation was unable to dispose of on the same day the waste collected and dumped in bins.
The next was the Corporation’s delay in operationalising the micro compost centres it had built and completing the centres it proposed to build to process at the local level the wet, degradable waste. The idea was to minimise the transport of waste to the Vellalore dump yard.
But of the proposed 69 micro compost centres, the Corporation had built fewer than 25 and of those ran fewer than 10 centres, the sources said. Those were the Corporation’s side of the problems.
At the generation end, the waste from houses and commercial establishments were mostly in mixed fashion – degradable and non-degradable waste together – and that increased the waste handlers’ problem in segregating those to be sent to the right places.
Besides, the dumping of waste in the open resulted in the waste entering drain to choke sewage flow.
The Corporation collected 1,000 to 1,100 tonnes waste a day. It handed over around 600 tonnes waste a day at the two transit stations, from where the Coimbatore Integrated Waste Management Company Pvt. Ltd., took it to Vellalore for processing.
Of the remaining 500-odd tonnes, the Corporation processed not more than 30 tonnes at the micro compost centres and another 50 tonnes at its vermin compost plants in Vellalore. It dumped the remaining 400-plus tonnes in the open in Vellalore.
The sources said for the Corporation to remedy the problem, it must rebuild the transit station in Ganapathy - closed to facilitate the Gandhipuram flyover work, operationalise all micro compost centres and strengthen collection infrastructure.
If the Corporation were to address problem in SWM in a piecemeal fashion by looking for ad-hoc solutions, the sources said the city could challenges in the days to come.