Clearing of legacy waste dumped at the Sarvodayapuram landfill site through bio-mining is making good progress.
Officials of the District Suchitwa Mission and the Alappuzha municipality said that segregation of 14,500 cubic metres of the waste had been completed. The yard has 55,000 cubic metres of legacy waste. Of this, processing of 29,000 cubic metres will be completed in the first phase.
12 categories
The waste is segregated in 12 categories — plastic, tyre, footwear, biomedical, metals, glass, rubber, e-waste, plastic bottles, and so on. Officials said that bio-mining of the remaining 26,000 cubic metres of waste would be carried out in the next phase for which funds had not been allocated yet.
The civic body has made a budgetary allocation of ₹3.7 crore for carrying out bio-mining at the site. Kozhikode-based M.C.K. Kutty Engineering Project Private Limited has been entrusted with the work.
The municipality set up the plant on 12 acres at Sarvodayapuram in Mararikulam South several years ago. Until 2012, the civic body used to dump truckloads of unsegregated waste at the yard daily. Mass protests forced the civic body to look for alternatives and it shut the plant following the successful implementation of decentralised waste management and source-level waste management in the Alappuzha municipal area. However, no concrete measures were taken to remove the dumped waste from the site until recently.
Solution
Officials said that scientific disposal of waste using the bio-mining process would bring an end to a long-standing problem and help the municipality use the site for other purposes.
Bio-mining is the scientific process of excavation, treatment, segregation, and gainful utilisation of aged municipal solid waste lying in dumpsites, typically referred to as legacy waste. The bio-mining process, which began in August this year, is expected to be completed before the nine-month deadline.
