ATREE has tied up with the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) to work on a project which will use waste water to green the parks in the city.
With three of their campaigns, ATREE looks to manage the material flow between three layers of the city - blue (waterbodies), green (plants, parks, gardens, urban farms) and grey (road networks, sewage channels and all things man made) - to ensure that there is effective waste management as well as utilisation of resources.
Speaking to The Hindu, Shreya Nath, who leads the Green City initiative at ATREE – CSEI, said that lakes coming back to their previous state will be a good visual metric of effective flow of material between the three layers.
Explaining the process of good flow, she added that to divert the waste water and raw sewage from the lakes in a climate responsible way, it could be used in other ways like construction, commercial and industrial usage (which uses 388 million litres a day according to ATREE estimates), tunnel boring for metro (which uses 60 thousand litres of water per metre), greening parks, and other such activities.
“Currently, the three layers are managed by different bodies and they do not account for the flow between them. But with such activities we can prove the economic benefits of treating sewage so that people take it up by themselves,” Ms. Shreya said.
She added that under the ‘Grey to Green’ campaign, logistics, conveyance and quality monitoring has been figured out by ATREE and a trial run for the same was conducted in a BBMP park in Yelahanka. The project was also supported by Karnataka State Pollution Control Board (KSPCB).
