WILL THE NEW GARBAGE TAX GIVE A PUSH TO WET WASTE COMPOSTING?

Right now, at the ward-level, barring a few bio-methanisation plants and lane composters, decentralised composting is insignificant compared to the huge amount of waste generated

- 

Mountains of muck, those stinky black spots of mixed garbage, are rising across the city again. But even as the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) claims to tackle them with a steep 36% garbage tax, a workable way out remains largely ignored: Wet waste composting. Localised ward-level composting with a multi-stakeholder approach could potentially solve half the problem, and the time is now.

Bengaluru generates an estimated 6,000 Metric Tonnes (MT) of solid waste every day, and almost 2,800 MT is wet waste. The lack of a city-wide, well-structured composting mechanism has meant that a big chunk of the wet waste gets mixed up and eventually ends up in landfills. Can the success stories from many apartment complexes and a recent public-private project involving the Bengaluru Metro Rail Corporation Limited (BMRCL) be replicated and scaled up?

Dubbed as the Solid Waste Management (SWM) user fee, the BBMP’s garbage tax is bound to generate an additional annual revenue of 750 crore. The bulk of this money will go for the collection, transport, processing and disposal of waste. But SWM experts ask why the same money can’t instead be used to buy compost bins for all the three million households in the city and tackle the mega problem at source? Part of it, they say, could also build a robust network of ward-level composting centres.

Ideally, hyper local composting with active involvement and monitoring by ward committees should have had a working system by now. But this has been a non-starter without an elected BBMP Council and corporators. The best bet now could be emulating the composting success models, now up and running in many apartments. Big complexes that generate more than 150kgs of wet waste daily are composting through internal converters and using it as manure for gardens.