GURUGRAM: The Municipal Corporation of Gurugram (MCG) will start segregated waste collection from Thursday.
To implement it effectively on the ground level, it will also have to overcome several infrastructure challenges like acquiring compartmentalised vehicles to collect segregated waste and digging composting pits to process wet waste, activists said.
MCG officials said they won’t be collecting garbage from households if it is not segregated at source into dry, wet and hazardous waste. The corporation will also ensure that collection vehicles have separate compartments within 10 days, they said. On Wednesday, MCG impounded two vehicles that didn’t have compartments.
“Although infrastructure remains a challenge, we will simultaneously work on it while collecting segregated waste. I have instructed the horticulture department to make composting pits in parks so that we have ample facilities for wet waste processing. We have also instructed waste collectors to keep records of households that don’t give segregated waste, so that we can penalise them,” MCG additional commissioner Vaishali Sharma said.
Activists, however, said the city requires infrastructure to support source-separated waste processing. “For example, in Bangalore, each ward has dry waste collection centres that pick up only dry waste and undertake secondary segregation and proper disposal of non-recyclable waste. Moreover, Gurugram doesn’t have any facilities for wet waste processing at the ward level. Each of the 35 wards in Gurugram should have composting and or bio-methanation facilities and payment terms should be based on recovery, not disposal,” said Ruchika Sethi Takkar, founder of Why Waste Your Waste, a citizens’ initiative.
Meanwhile, waste management concessionaire Ecogreen said they have 347 vehicles for collecting garbage, of which around 302 vehicles have partitions. “We conducted a training session for drivers, supervisors, MCG sanitation teams and other workers involved in the waste collection process on Wednesday. There are two aspects of the training — one is to train them to ensure they collect and transport segregated waste and the other is to train them to convince people to segregate their waste at source,” Ecogreen deputy CEO Sanjay Sharma said. “Our staff will also coordinate with MCG and provide them information on households not segregating waste,” he added.
For commercial units, Ecogreen officials said they already send separate vehicles to collect dry and wet waste since the quantity of waste generated is huge.
There are three different ways of waste collection in the city — housekeeping staff collect waste on behalf of RWAs, Ecogreen sub-vendors collect it through workers and dumpster-based collection in semi-urban areas. Residents said while MCG enforcement teams can implement waste segregation in the areas where it is collecting waste, it will have to ensure segregation in areas where societies and RWAs are collecting waste as well. “Also, Ecogreen’s payment terms are based on the tipping fee model and it is profitable for them to collect mixed waste. There are no penalties for collecting and transporting of mixed waste, which needs to change to implement waste segregation,” a resident of Sector 10A said.
