Lemon juice, hygiene and Mumbai
Last week, a video surfaced, showing lemon juice being prepared in unhygienic conditions at a food stall in a suburban railway station. Central Railway officials promptly banned the sale of juices. Was the action correct? It might not have been. Some years ago, BMC issued ads warning citizens against drinking sugarcane juice from street vendors, saying it contained E. coli bacteria. A lawyer collected milk shake samples from hotels. Tests showed they had a much higher level of contamination.
Plastic ban a headache for BMC
The plastic ban imposed in Maharashtra will complete one year next weekend. However, the ban is turning out to be a headache for the BMC, and not the producers and distributors of plastic products. Officials have seized plastic products over the past year and around 51,000 tonnes of plastic is dumped in warehouses. The civic body collected fines totaling I2.5 crore. However, storing such a high volume of plastic for recycling is turning out to be an expensive proposition for authorities. The BMC has published tenders for recycling of this plastic twice. However, no company came forward, as none of them are capable of recycling such a huge quantity of plastic.
Exhibition of conservation efforts
The Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) in Mumbai has organised an exhibition to showcase its conservation efforts to the public. Sometimes, the artifacts are examined through microscopes. They have to be ‘treated’ with anti-bacterial or anti-fungal measures and several of the processes that go into preservation of artifacts are being showcased at the exhibition. Audio-visual information on such processes is on display at the exhibition.
Reduced garbage
If BMC officials are to be believed, the Maximum City is now cleaner and this is reflected in the reduced amount of garbage. The city once produced around 7,300 MT to 7500 MT of garbage daily. Now the amount has come down to 6,924 MT. The reduced volume of waste is being credited to a sustained effort to ensure bio-degradation of wet waste at source. With the existing dumping grounds over burdened, the BMC had made bio-degradation compulsory for institutions/societies that produce more that 100 kg of waste every day. This brought down the volume of garbage from 9,500 MT in 2015 to below 7,000 MT for the first time.