The Kolkata Municipal Corporation, which is struggling to run the waste-segregation programme in the city, has decided to buy 300 new waste-collection vehicles that it believes will help in collecting segregated waste from households.
Mayor Firhad Hakim said on Wednesday he had cleared a proposal to buy 300 new battery-operated vehicles for waste collection.
These vehicles are smaller than that conventional waste collection carts and can enter very narrow lanes.
There is a shortage in the number of waste collection vehicles required to pick up biodegradable and non-biodegradable waste separately.
The shortage is resulting in the collectors picking up the two kinds of waste together.
If there are more vehicles, one set can be used to pick up biodegradable waste and the other to pick up non-biodegradable waste, an official of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) said.
“We will buy 300 more battery-operated vehicles to pick up waste. This will help in the collection of segregated waste,” Hakim said.
The KMC started distributing bins among residents to store biodegradable and non-biodegradable waste separately from December 1, 2022. KMC officials had then said they hoped to implement the collection of segregated waste in a few months.
More than a year has passed but most households are still not segregating waste.
The green bins are meant for biodegradable waste like kitchen waste, cooked food, fruit and vegetable peels, soiled paper and meat and bones.
The blue bins are meant for non-biodegradable wastes like paper, plastic cups, glass, metal books, leather, cloth rags and wires.
The waste collectors, too, are not collecting the waste in a segregated manner.
It was initially decided that two vehicles, one each for two kinds of waste, would go to
all neighbourhoods to pick up the waste.
The other option was to keep buckets in a cart, with some of the buckets meant for biodegradable waste and others for non-biodegradable waste.
But in multiple places in the city, only one vehicle goes to collect waste in the morning. Residents throw all the waste in the same vehicle.