THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Three months after bringing on line its fourth solid waste treatment plant, the Attingal municipality is gearing up to try out a new form of waste processing which will require less space and will be more eco-friendly.
As per the ‘container composting' method, solid waste will be collected in one large vessel, similar to the containers used for shipping goods. Air and moisture will be passed into the vessel at a regular interval for 30 days, at the end of which the waste will be converted into manure.
K. Mohankumar, secretary of the Kasaragod Social Service Society — the non-governmental organisation setting up the new facility — told The Hindu that the main advantage of container composting is that it requires only a fraction of space taken up by the existing ‘windrow' composting plants at Attingal. The existing method requires 80 sq m of area to process one tonne of waste. Two containers which will be installed on a trial basis in October 2010, each of which can process 15 tonnes, will occupy only 16 sq m.
“Since the containers are completely airtight, there will be no odour around them. A problem common to solid waste treatment facilities is the leakage of leachate. Here, the leachate will come out only through a designated pipeline. Moreover, there will be no piling up of garbage at the site as the entire process will take place inside the container,” Mr. Mohankumar explained.
Attingal generates close to 17 tonnes of garbage a day, 18 to 20 per cent of this is non-biodegradable. The municipality collects about 13 tonnes of garbage, which is then taken to its four treatment plants, the latest of which was commissioned in April 2010. The non-biodegradable component of the waste will be used for engineering a landfill spread over one acre. The landfill has been designed to accommodate waste generated over the next 25 years. The machine which will shred plastic waste before it goes into the landfill will become operational by the end of September.
The municipality has drawn up plans to set up biogas plants and vermin-composting facilities in houses and other institutions so that it can eventually cap the amount of garbage reaching its treatment plants, two of which use the vermin-composting method to process waste. As the municipality expands these centralised and localised facilities, these may enable it to process nearly all its solid waste.
The treatment plants at Attingal now produce more than 3 tonnes of fertilizer a day which costs the municipality Rs.4 a kg.
Source:The Hindu,13-8-2010
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