Brahmapuram waste plant turns profitable

KOCHI: The solid waste treatment plant of the Kochi Corporation at Brahmapuram may bring in additional revenue for the civic body soon.

The plant has started earning revenue through the sale of manure and it will soon be able to generate a considerable amount through sales, said Babu Ambat, executive director of the Centre for Environment and Development (CED).

The plant is expected to produce at least 5,000 tonnes of manure within the next two months from the accumulated garbage and the civic body would get around Rs.1 crore through the sale.The average monthly expenditure for running the plant would come to around Rs. 10 lakh. It has started posting a monthly profit of around Rs. 4 lakh, Mr. Ambat said.

The CED is in charge of the maintenance and management of the Brahmapuram plant, which had developed major technical snags. The agency was also assigned the charge of making the plant operational after the floor where the machinery was installed sank.

After the rectification works, the plant has become fully operational and it now works round the clock. The accumulated waste would be cleared within two months. The floor of the plant was stabilised and strengthened and it was raised by 3ft as part of the rectification process, he said.

The present system would work flawlessly at least for a few more years to come. However, the repair works of the windrow was not undertaken as it would be an expensive affair.

The rectification works were carried out by at the plant site at an expense of Rs. 27 lakh, he said.

The FACT has purchased 350 tonnes of organic manure at the rate of Rs. 2 a kg. Each day, the plant is producing around 20 tonnes of manure. The CED is also planning to give onsite training for the employees of the Kochi Corporation for running the plant, he said.

The Central government had decided that the public sector fertilizer companies need to produce and market certain quantity of organic manure along with the chemical fertilizers produced by them. With the government policy in place, the FACT has become a regular buyer of organic manure from the corporation. Earlier, private planters had purchased manure produced from the civic body.

Incidentally, the plant site had become a garbage dumping site as processing came to a grinding halt. Unprocessed waste had piled up in the plant site and at one stage the garbage heaps prevented the view of the plant from outside.

The technical snag of the machinery and the subsequent accumulation of garbage at the plant site had invited severe criticism as the Corporation had spent a considerable amount on it.

The experts who inspected the plant had reported that all basic engineering principles were violated while constructing the plant, which was set up using the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission funds.

Source:The Hindu, 2-8-2010