Attingal municipality to experiment with eco-friendly ‘container composting'

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

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