The government has earmarked around ₹5.1 crore to carry out biomining at the dumping yard of the Kothamangalam municipality spread over 2.6 acres at Kumbalathumuri.
It is among the 20 sites identified by the Local Self-Government department under the World Bank-funded Kerala Solid Waste Management Project (KSWMP). The government had awarded the contract for biomining and retrieval of legacy dumping sites worth ₹95.2 crore to a Nagpur-based company recently.
The site at Kumbalathamuri is located in Ward 6 of the municipality. It has a total area of 2.6 acres. Legacy waste is lying around 2.13 acres out of the total 2.6 acres. The volume of waste to be remediated is around 29,915 cubic metres. Legacy waste is lying at a height of three metres above the ground level and 2.5 metres below, according to the Environment Impact Assessment report published by the KSWMP.
“The exact quantity of waste to be biomined will be ascertained after conducting a survey. Legacy waste is spread over nearly three sectors in the site. We have been told that the work at the site has been included under the second phase of the project,” said K.V. Thomas, chairman of the municipality’s health standing committee.
The dumping of waste at the site had started nearly 30 years ago. It was stopped in 2019. The land will be retrieved after the site reclamation work that included excavation, screening, and separation of material into various components including soil, recyclable materials, and residues. The EIA report stated that the biomining work would not cause problems to the public as there was only one house within the 200-metre-radius of the site. However, fire preparedness would be ensured as fire incidents were reported at the site in 2019 and 2022, it said.
