Waste parks away from city: Remedy or risk?

When the Bangalore Development Authority formed the Banashankari 6th stage layout in 2001, little did the buyers know that one day, a part of the layout would have to bear the garbage burden of growing Bengaluru.

The layout with 14 blocks and over 21,000 sites also had a Common Amenity (CA) site. In 2015, this CA site was identified for establishing composting plants as part of Bengaluru’s plan to decentralise waste processing. The operations started in 2016. Since then, the residents have been living with unbearable stench. Today, many sites in the 4th and 6th blocks remain unbuilt.

T S Mahesha, BSK 6th Stage Residents Welfare Association president, says the plant started without proper approval from the Karnataka State Pollution Control Board and has no buffer zone.

“The plant has no leachate treatment facility. It is directly discharged into a stormwater drain, which finally goes and fills Sompura Lake in the neighbourhood,” he adds.

The citizens cannot even approach the officials to express their problems. BBMP marshals stop them from getting inside the plant while officials remain invisible. “When about 100 of us protested, police complaints were filed against us,” Mahesha explains.

The same problems exist in six other waste composting plants in Bengaluru. Faced with opposition from locals, some remained defunct, while some did not function to their full capacity, according to data shared by officials.

In a recent interaction, Deputy Chief Minister D K Shivakumar listened to the woes of BSK 6th stage residents. As a follow-up, he announced the building of four integrated solid waste management parks around Bengaluru by identifying forest lands of 100 acres each.

Data: BSWML Graphics: Sankar Ganesh

Stirring a hornet’s nest

The announcement has sparked a debate among citizens, activists, and experts. While the residents around the waste processing plants welcome the move, the activists working in the sector feel that the relocation might only be a temporary solution and that the government should look beyond it.

“In 1975, when the Karnataka Compost Development Corporation (KCDC) plant was set up, the area was said to be on the outskirts. Similar is the case with the Mavallipura landfill near Yelahanka and Mandur near Mahadevapura. But as the city grew, these areas developed and have become a part of the city. Bengaluru and the surrounding areas are growing rapidly. This shifting will hence be only a temporary solution, and we might end up in the same situation a few years from now,” says Sandya Narayanan, a member of the Solid Waste Management Round Table (SWMRT).

A few others opined that this could send the wrong message to the citizens, indirectly implying that waste processing is a dirty job and must be done outside the city.

The debate also hovers around centralisation vs decentralisation of waste processing.While the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) has been stressing over decentralisation over the last few years, the move to relocate the plants by identifying land in four corners of the city would only mean that the government is shifting back to a centralised processing system.

Sandya says the move should not promote the ‘not in my backyard’ idea. “There are technological advancements that could help bring down the stench. If numerous industries that produce odour can operate, BBMP can also leverage such modern technology to make the process stench-free. This way, processing plants can be operated in a decentralised manner,” she said.

Shifting garbage processing to a faraway land is akin to admitting to BBMP’s inability to find scientific, non-polluting methods to process garbage locally, says an environmentalist who prefers anonymity.

‘Too early to oppose’

Senior BBMP officials opine that it is too early to oppose the proposal, as the government has not announced the finer details.

“We need to see how the project is planned and then oppose it. It might work if the government can identify huge parcels of land and mark buffer zones to prevent development in the surrounding area. Previously, though the plants were set up in the outer areas, the government had failed to mark buffer zones and regulate growth around them. As a result, people started living around the plants, and then the opposition started. If we can mark the buffer zone and regulate growth, this might work,” a senior BBMP official said.

Experts also point out the unsustainability of the cost of transporting waste to faraway places and the overheads.

“The quantity of waste produced in the city is growing by the day. The logistics is something we must consider. The number of transfer stations, the vehicles, and the manpower required to transport waste to the outskirts daily will be huge,” says an expert, preferring anonymity.

Countering this argument, an official said that the government will prioritise people’s well-being over the expenses.

“Now, people have complained that they are suffering, and if the government can provide a solution that will incur an additional cost, the government will opt for it. Also, the BBMP and Bengaluru Solid Waste Management Limited (BSWM) are entitled to levy a user fee. If that plan materialises, funding the additional costs would not be a tough task,” the official said.

Need for a futuristic plan

While all governments that ruled over the last decade proposed their own solution for the garbage problem, there have been no efforts to look at the possible growth in waste generation and how it has to be tackled.

“We have been busy catching up,” says Sandya. ”No government body has so far come forward to prepare a blueprint or a vision document for the future,” she adds.

“Managing waste in Bengaluru is a Herculean task given the quantum of waste generated daily, and shifting waste processing units with a futuristic approach of circular economy of reduction, recycling, and reuse is the need of the hour. The existing SWM units are either defunct or inefficient; therefore, waste processing and landfill units need to be shifted outside Bengaluru with modern disposal and recycling methods,” says Krishna Raj, a professor at the Institute for Social and Economic Change.

“However, establishing landfills and waste processing units close to forests is not a good idea. It threatens biodiversity and the environment. Minimising waste, segregation and recycling degradable waste at source is more cost-effective. The existing units need complete revamping along with new landfills and processing units from the context of economies of scale,” he adds.

Ramprasad V, a solid waste management expert advising the BBMP on Swachh Survekshan, feels the plants should be shifted to industrial areas rather than the forest area.

“The solution is to treat waste processing as an industry rather than a responsibility. If waste is treated as raw material and the processing plants are operated like an industry, they can be shifted to industrial areas. The government should provide them the benefits and the advantages that the industries get, and in turn, the plants should operate at industry standards,” he says.

He adds that the government must also take up a feasibility study, socio-economic survey, and cost-benefit analysis. “The study reports could help determine the direction in which the project should be spearheaded.”

However, sources in the waste management sector feel that the dilly-dallying attitude of politicians and trials and errors on the waste management front are leading to policy paralysis, putting the city in peril for future generations.

Tender remains a non-starter

The city’s inability to segregate waste forms the core problem that haunts solid waste management. The mandate for garbage contractors so far was to collect wet waste from every household daily. In contrast, dry waste was collected by other vendors who were mandated to collect it twice a week. This led to garbage being strewn on roads as people also stopped segregating as waste was not collected daily, explains a solid waste management vendor who prefers anonymity.

The Bengaluru Solid Waste Management Limited (BSWML), the parastatal tasked with managing Bengaluru’s waste, is yet to implement the new garbage tender floated in January. The reason: The packages were prepared for 243 wards, but the city now has 225 wards after final delimitation, and the packages must be re-organised again. Officials concerned refused to commit to a timeline to finalise the tenders.

The tender aims to follow the No Garbage on Ground (NGoG) principle and allows garbage contractors to collect all types of waste, including construction and demolition waste upto 350kg/house.

S N Balasubramanian, president of the BBMP Garbage Contractors’ Association, explains that earlier, seven types of collections, including door-to-door collection, dry waste, sanitary waste, animal waste, construction and demolition (C&D) waste, bulk waste, etc. were handled by various contractors. In this system, pinpointing who threw the garbage on the ground and penalising the party was difficult.

In the new tender, the selected contractor will be responsible for the primary and secondary collection and transportation of wet waste, dry waste, sanitary waste, street sweeping waste, C&D waste and other waste generated in the area assigned to him. “Since one person is responsible, it is easy to fix accountability,” he explains. He says the new tender will introduce 680 new compactors and 8000 CNG autos that adhere to Euro-VI emission norms.

The tender conditions also state that the “Waste stays segregated through the secondary transportation sent to the designated processing facilities”. This is crucial for many ongoing and upcoming plans of BBMP, including processing waste into compost and refuse-derived fuel pellets that will feed the WTE plants. Though the tender issue is now under court monitoring, Balasubramaniam hopes it will be finalised soon.

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(Published 13 October 2023, 23:57 IST)