Despite Current Problems With Waste Management, Mysuru Aims For Zero Waste To Landfills

New Delhi: Karnataka’s Mysuru, which bagged the ‘India’s cleanest city’ title in the Swachh Survekshan 2016 but slipped to the fifth position in 2017, is struggling with waste management. The state’s third populous city, generates, over 500 tonnes of solid waste on a daily basis but the Mysuru City Corporation (MCC) only has the capacity to treat over 200 tonnes. Because a few of the nine waste treatment plants are currently non-operational, the entire burden to process the city’s waste is borne by the centralised composting plant at Vidyaranyapuram, which was set up two decades ago and has now turned into a garbage dumping yard. In a bid to resolve the solid waste and garbage management issue, a concern which is being raised by local residents of Vidyaranyapuram and other localities, the civic body now plans to start all of the nine zero solid waste management (ZSWM) plants in the city to treat the waste and make compost. Zero waste implies that the garbage is reused and none of it is sent to the landfill site.

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While speaking to NDTV on the waste management issue, the health officer of the Mysuru City Corporation, D.G. Nagaraj said, we want to generate wealth out of the waste that the city generates. The income generated by selling the composted organic manure and the segregated recyclable waste comes out to be around 25 percent of the total cost of investment. The entire corporation is working hard to ensure that no waste should go to landfill sites rather the waste should get processed to create compost to use for various purposes.

When all of the nine zero waste management plants will get operational in a few weeks, it will help reduce the burden on the centralized composting plant located at Vidyaranyapuram, where the garbage is being dumped,” the official further said.

To ensure zero waste goes to landfill, the garbage will be first segregated into biodegradable and non-biodegradable waste, while the biodegradable waste will be used for composting and the non-biodegradable waste will be recycled or reused. Currently, the MCC has the facility to segregate around 80 percent of the waste and in the next few months, the civic body will increase its capacity to 100 percent.

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Reportedly, the local residents of Vidyaranyapuram and other localities protested against the failure of the Mysuru City Corporation to clear the huge pile of garbage dumped at the plant. According to an estimate by the MCC, over seven lakh tonnes of garbage has piled up at the Vidyaranyapuram compost plant in the past several years, making it unbearable for resident to dwell in houses in the surroundings.

In the wake of the recent protests against unloading of excess waste at the Vidranyapuram plant, the Deputy Commissioner D Randeep inspected all the nine plants and figured that the available facilities were not fully utilised. Based on the findings, the commissioner decided to make all the plants fully operational and increase the capacity of all the plants in a bid to cut down pressure on the centralised composting plant at Vidyaranyapuram.

The plants were set up in each zone of the city to ensure that the waste generated from a particular zone should be taken to its respective plant, in an effort to treat the waste at source. While the existing capacity of the nine zero-waste management plants is 5 tonnes per day each, the district administration has now doubled it to 10 tonnes per day with an investment of over Rs 90 lakh.

Besides increasing the capacity of the existing centralised garbage processing units, the civic body also has plans to setup two more solid waste management plants to ensure that Mysuru in future sends negligible amount of waste for dumping at landfill sites.