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Solid Waste Management

A tonne of used ball pens to be sent for recycling

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The Hindu        17.07.2018  

A tonne of used ball pens to be sent for recycling

Saying no to plastic:Pens collected by student volunteers under the Mission Ball Pen initiative.

Saying no to plastic:Pens collected by student volunteers under the Mission Ball Pen initiative.  

Students from 25 schools take part in Mission Ball Pen

Used ball pens weighing more than a tonne were collected from all over the district as part of Mission Ball Pen, an initiative of Swasthy Foundation in Kozhikode, in an effort to reduce plastic waste and highlight the need to recycle it.

Student volunteers from 25 schools collected used ball pens from their neighbourhood and handed them over to the Swasthy team. The closing ceremony of the campaign for the year 2017-18 was held at Malabar Christian College Higher Secondary School on Saturday, where the schools handed over the pens collected over the year. The collected pens that weighed 106 kilograms were exhibited at the venue.

Environmentalist T.V. Rajan was the guest of honour at the event, in which AUP School, Kottur and NGO Quarters Higher Secondary School that performed well in the initiative were honoured.

Mission Ball Pen is the brainchild of Harishankar S. Nair and Shabab Karunyam who, as undergraduate students, had volunteered to collect pens as part of ‘Pen Drive to Biennale’ almost two years ago. They had collected more than one lakh pens at the time, that were used for an installation at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. They realised that students continued to collect pens in the schools, but did not know what to do with them. This triggered the Mission Ball Pen initiative. The mission is not just about collecting pens, but also about creating awareness in schools and colleges on the three Rs - reduce, reuse, and recycle.

The pens collected on Saturday were handed over to Green Worms, a waste management venture in Kozhikode, to be recycled.

 

Residents near Sewage Farm may soon get a breather

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The Hindu      17.07.2018  

Residents near Sewage Farm may soon get a breather

The composting plant on the premises of Sewage Farm in Mysuru handles 200 tonnes of solid waste at present.

The composting plant on the premises of Sewage Farm in Mysuru handles 200 tonnes of solid waste at present.  

State govt. gives Mysuru City Corporation approval to establish two more waste composting units, at Kesare and Rayankere

The foul smell enveloping a large swathe of residential localities in the city — Vidyaranyapuram, J.P. Nagar and other nearby layouts — from untreated and decaying solid waste dumped at the Sewage Farm here has disturbed the calm of residents for many years now, but it may be a thing of the past soon.

With the State government giving the green signal to the Mysuru City Corporation (MCC) to establish two plants for converting waste into compost, tonnes of waste which otherwise go untreated will be turned into compost, giving some much-needed revenue to the cash-strapped civic body.

As of now, Mysuru generates 450-500 tonnes of solid waste, and only 200 tonnes are converted into manure at the plant established on PPP model on the Sewage Farm premises. The remaining waste, untreated, is dumped on the farm premises and it eventually decays and emits an unbearable stench.

The issue had figured in the recently-concluded Assembly elections, with some residents demanding a promise from political parties and candidates to relocate the Sewage Farm.

After years of wait and struggle, the issue has received some much-needed attention, with the government clearing the MCC’s proposal of establishing two waste recycling plants, one with a capacity of 150 tonnes and the other, 100 tonnes. The plants are proposed at Kesare and Rayankere. “We have received environmental clearance from the competent agencies for the two plants. Our proposal has come to a stage where the next step will be to float tenders for the plants, estimated to cost Rs. 49 crore. The cost also includes modernisation of the existing 200-tonne-capacity waste treatment plant,” said MCC health officer D.G. Nagaraj.

Dr. Nagaraj toldThe Hinduthere was no need to relocate the Sewage Farm as garbage would not be unloaded at the site once the new plants are established. “We hope to establish the plants in a couple of years,” he said, adding that the government and the MCC would share the expenditure on it.

The promoters of the existing composting plant were giving to the MCC a royalty of Rs. 6 lakh a year and 5% revenue on the compost produced from waste. “The idea is not to make money from waste but to effectively handle it. The MCC invested nothing on establishing the first plant,” Dr. Nagaraj said.

 

Mobile waste management squad to penalise littering

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The Times of India       22.05.2018

Mobile waste management squad to penalise littering

Trichy: Taking a cue from police patrol and beat vehicles assigned for surveillance activity, the Trichy Corporation has launched an exclusive mobile solid waste management (SWM) flying squad. With an officer on board, the squad will identify and penalise people on the spot for violations pertaining to the revised solid waste management (SWM) rules. The civic body has identified several hotspots in the city where public littering is significant and the squad will be spending additional hours in inspecting such neighbourhoods.

So far, the civic body had been heavily spending time and resources on spreading awareness on SWM such as source segregation and mandatory handing over of accumulated domestic waste to sanitary workers in door-to-door waste collection. Acknowledging that the need to penalise residents who are not cooperating with the efforts of the civic body to improvise city’s cleanliness, Trichy Corporation has planned to target frequent violators considered as hindrance in achieving litter free roads status.

From this week, a vehicle belonging to the urban local body (ULB) will be assigned to supervise all the 65 wards to penalise the offenders caught red-handed while littering. The squad will also penalise shops if they fail to place two bins each for biodegradable and non-biodegradable waste in their establishments.

“A sanitary officer will be on board the SWM squad vehicle to oversee cleanliness of all four zones in civic body limits. The officer will be equipped with spot fine enabled gadget, commercial establishments including eateries will be focused as we have been receiving complaints on them found dumping waste on roads,” corporation commissioner N Ravichandran told TOI.

Unlike monitoring and penalising only the residents and commercial entities, the SWM squad will inspect the performance and cleaning activities of fellow officials and sanitary workers as allegations were raised about burning waste mounds along the roads in Karumandapam and Ponmalai localities.
 


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