Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) will start distributing two bins to each household in Kolkata from December 1 asking residents to keep the biodegradable and non-biodegradable wastes generated in their homes separately in these two bins, a senior official of the civic body said on Tuesday.
Large apartment blocks and housing societies will be given larger bins that will be kept on the ground floor. All residents will have to throw their waste in the bins kept on the ground floor. The KMC’s waste collectors will pick up the waste from the ground floor.
Unlike in the case of individual households, residents of a housing society will not get separate bins for their flats, said Debabrata Majumdar, the mayor-in-council member overseeing the KMC solid waste management department. The green bins will be for biodegradable waste like food, vegetables and fruit waste. This will be collected everyday. The blue bins will be for non-biodegradable waste like paper, glass, metal and wood. This waste will be collected on alternate days. The non-biodegradable waste is also called recyclable waste because of its potential to be recycled for further use.
Each of the two bins given to the households will be of 10-litre capacity. The bins supplied to housing societies will be of 240-litre capacity. The morning waste collectors will also have separate green and blue bins in their carts when they come to collect waste from households, unlike the current practice where all waste is mixed and thrown in the cart.
All councillors of Kolkata will be briefed in two sessions about the waste segregation at source on Tuesday and Wednesday. “We will begin the distribution of bins from December 1. We are hoping that the bin distribution and collection of segregated waste will take about a month to start. By the end of December, we can have segregated waste collection everywhere in Kolkata,” said Majumdar.
Majumdar said that they were planning to begin the collection of segregated waste immediately after the bin distribution is completed in an area. Each ward of Kolkata is divided into several blocks. An official said once the distribution of bins was over in a block, the collection of segregated waste can start within a day or two. “There is no point waiting for bins to be distributed across the city.
At present, segregated waste is collected from 27 wards in the city. In December, it will be expanded to other 117 awards. There are a total of 144 wards in the Kolkata municipal area. The segregated waste will be sent to the facilities where it can be used.
For example, the KMC has a plant where biodegradable waste is used to make bio-CNG. But a good volume ofthe waste would still go to the Dhapa waste disposal ground as the plants are still running at a capacity far less than the volume of waste generated in the city. This is a mammoth task and will take a few weeks for the entire city to be covered,” said the official.
The KMC has procured nearly 30.8 lakh 10-litre capacity bins to be supplied to households.