Coimbatore Corporation stops midway the plan to locally process organic waste

The civic body has decided against constructing 33 micro compost centres

Coimbatore Corporation has decided not to construct 33 of the 69 micro compost centres (MCCs).

It has completed construction of 34 MCCs, is in the process of constructing one and caught in a legal battle over construction of another one. The Corporation had conceived construction of 69 MCCs at ₹ 47.61 crore in 2018 to process organic waste locally without having to transport it to the dump yard at Vellalore and comply with the directions of the National Green Tribunal.

The Corporation had told the Tribunal In October 2018 that it had planned to complete the construction in four months, by February 2019. By locally processing the waste, the Corporation had hoped to limit to around 600 tonnes the quantity of waste it transported to the dump yard, save money on fuel used to transport organic waste to the yard and eventually reduce waste piled up at the yard by taking up biomining.

As of 2022, the Corporation had taken up biomining but had not completed the MCCs that would have stopped transportation of organic waste to the Vellalore yard. The reasons that it was unable to take up construction of the 33 MCCs were varied but the most important one was opposition from people in the neighbourhood of the sites chosen for the MCCs construction, said the Corporation sources.

Of the 34 MCCS that it had constructed, the Corporation had not commenced organic waste processing in all. Corporation Commissioner Raja Gopal Sunkara said in a few MCCs there was no tanks to process the waste, in a few others no provision for discharge of leachate, in a few there was no shredder and in a few others the shredder was under repair.

At present, only fewer than 10 were fully operational, he said and added that the Corporation was taking steps to fill gaps in the MCCs to operationalise those.

Solid waste management experts said the way forward for the Corporation was to private the MCCs – hand over those to NGOs or other organisations – to keep those up and running and efficiently at that and pointed to the Corporation handing over the Ondipudur MCC to the Residents’ Awareness Association of Coimbatore to underscore the point.