The State capital is among 20 municipalities and cities from 13 States in the country to join the urban solid waste management initiative launched in New Delhi on Tuesday to achieve 100% source segregation of waste by October 2, 2019. The Forum of Cities that Segregate, launched by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), is expected to give the much- needed impetus to the campaign for waste segregation at source. The forum was launched following a stakeholders’ meeting and attended by Mayors and municipal officials, including Mayor V. K. Prasanth.
“The main agenda is to give participating cities a platform to exchange knowledge on solid waste management (SWM),” says Chandra Bhushan, Deputy Director General, CSE. “We hope that the cities would become pioneers in SWM and guide other cities on technical, economic and social aspects of managing waste,” he said. The initiative comes close on the heels of the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs’ (MoHUA) countrywide campaign from June 5 to segregate waste at source. But, ensuring segregation at source requires infrastructure for segregating, transporting and processing the waste, and tough compliance systems.
The ministry had also launched Swachh Survekshan, city cleanliness survey, in January this year to rank cities on the basis of their segregation, collection, processing and disposal efficiency. CSE has agreed to assist these municipalities on building their capacity to achieve the goal. In the State capital, 300 tonnes per day is the waste that is being accumulated and 60 % of it is organic. Besides Thiruvananthapuram, Alappuzha, three municipal authorities from Delhi-New Delhi Municipal Corporation, East Delhi Municipal Corporation and South Delhi Municipal Corporation and urban bodies of Bengaluru, Patna, Gurugram, Imphal, Gangtok, Greater Hyderabad, Bhopal, Indore and Mysuru figure in the list of local bodies.
“The problem is not about finding the right technology for waste disposal. The problem is how to integrate the technology with a system of household-level segregation so that waste does not end up in landfills, but is processed and reused,” CSE Director General Sunita Narain said at the function.