This week, the Agarwal family mixed their dry and wet waste. “Just this time,” they thought, although they are usually quite sincere when it comes to separating their garbage.
Several kilometres away, a 100-acre dumpsite in Indore was overflowing with legacy waste—recyclables like plastic, metal and the rest that were damaging the environment in more ways than one.
Mountains of garbage were piling up, and combustibles like cloth, plastic, wood and paper would catch fire, polluting the air.
When Indore, the commercial capital of MP got a disappointing rank in the Swachh Survekshan of 2014, the authorities and citizens decided it was high time that they combined their efforts, for the city.
Their efforts were successful and how! Read here how the city became the cleanest in India within three years of getting a dismal rating on the Swachh Survekshan.
But even as the citizens were extra careful about not littering Indore, the 100-acre dumpsite that bore the burden of several years of dumping, was still in a pitiful state.
Furthermore, even as the Indore Municipal Corporation was trying to execute bio-remediation work there, the process was moving at a snail’s pace.
This, till IAS officer Asheesh Singh was appointed as the Municipal Commissioner of IMC in May 2018.
Speaking to The Better India, the IAS officer says, “When I joined the IMC in 2018, 13 lakh metric tonnes of waste was dumped on the ground, and the IMC had achieved to clear out just 2 lakh metric tonnes in the previous two years. The housing colonies nearby were facing the curse of pollution due to the open dumpsite, and for the future development, the land wasted due to indiscriminate dumping needed to be reclaimed.”
The reclamation project had begun in 2016-17 when the IMC had outsourced the work to a contractor. It was the same year when, and the dumping of mixed waste was banned in low-lying areas and open dumps.
Expanding the jurisdiction beyond municipal areas, these rules put the “overall responsibility for the enforcement of the provision of these rules within the territorial limits of their jurisdiction.”
However, the outsourcing of work had proved two things—that the development was very slow and very expensive.
Singh, who had dreamed of joining the civil services since he was a child, was determined to take up this project with a different strategy. He decided to complete it within a shorter time period and without costing the municipal corporation an arm and a leg.
He began with the idea that the dumpsite could be transferred into a beautiful golf course—a place that people would look forward to visit.
“Bio-remediation or bio-mining is an environmentally friendly technique to separate soil and recyclables like plastic, metal, paper, cloth and other solid materials from legacy waste,” he informed TBI, adding that, “The work was taken up on war footing, and bio-remediation of legacy waste of approximately 13 lakh metric ton of garbage was completed on 5th December 2018.”
Explaining further, he said that the topmost layer in a landfill is usually dusty and may have several materials that are still in the active biological state. This layers thus needs to be stabilised using herbal or biological sanitisers.
The sanitised layer is then raked through to pull out rags, plastic, rubber, textiles etc. Using horizontal screens, stones, bricks, ceramics etc. are removed before sending the segregated waste to appointed contractors or recyclers.