City generates 700 tonnes of excess waste during festival

Bengaluru has generated up to 700 tonnes of excess garbage over the last two days of the Ayudha Pooja and Dasara festivals.

Most of the garbage is wet waste generated from market areas such as KR Market, Basavanagudi, Malleswaram and KR Puram. The rise in garbage is put at around 10-15 per cent of the City’s total garbage of 3,500-4,000 tonnes per day.

BBMP Engineer-in-Chief M R Venkatesh says the civic agency has the experience of dealing with excess garbage generated during festival days. “The waste is distributed among five to six wet converters in the City, where wet waste is converted into compost, which can be used as fuel,” says Venkatesh.

The garbage is distributed to waste treatment plants located across the City - Seegehalli, Kannahalli, Doddabidrakallu, Mavallipura, KCDC, Terra Firma, MGP and Subrayapalya. The plants have capacity to crush 100 to 250 tonnes of waste.

“Every festival we have a typical rise in the quantity of garbage of around 10 per cent to 15 per cent. The BBMP has several plants installed with machinery to convert waste into useful products. To that extent we are confident that we will be able to handle the waste generated over the last two days. The markets have to be cleaned up, as accumulated waste there looks like mountains,” Venkatesh said.

Heaps of uncleared garbage till Friday evening could be seen at Avenue Road, KR Market, Wilson Garden, Nagarthpet, Kumaraswamy Layout, among other areas. It would take two to three days, if not more, to clear this high volume of garbage.

There is plenty of dry waste too that has been generated. The dry waste is converted into shreddings which can be used as a product in the cement industry.

This is done by using the dry waste as a firing product in kilns. Cement manufacture requires high temperatures in kilns. So, the dry waste generated is used as a firing product - if you put the dry waste into kilns, they produce instant heat and the overall temperatures go up.

Thus, dry waste contributes to cement manufacture. Companies like ITC, Zuari collect the dry waste from BBMP regularly, the engineer-in-chief pointed out.

Then there are also the 187 dry waste collection centres across the City which collect dry waste regularly to deposit the same to a centralised plant from where it is taken for shredding and firing.

 The dry waste includes cotton, paper, plastic - all of which are recyclable, too. Recycling waste into useful products is normally undertaken to reduce high quantities of dry waste.

“The BBMP makes use of waste as a natural resource material. There is no profit motive involved in selling the waste to convert it into useful material. The converted material proves beneficial to the environment as a whole.

If individual homes can use wet waste at source itself, this practice too will benefit the environment enormously and reduce the quantity of waste and garbage generated. This leads to savings as a whole - there is reduction in the usage of manpower, vehicles for instance, which will cut costs at the overall level,” he said.