ROURKELA: The Rourkela Municipal Corporation (RMC) on Friday kicked off a dedicated service to collect garbage from bulk waste generators and take it directly to the micro composting centres (MCCs) for processing. The service aims to achieve garbage-free status for Rourkela Smart City and ensure a clean environment. Two vehicles fitted with separate bins to collect segregated wet and dry waste have been pressed into service to collect garbage from the doorsteps of bulk waste generators at a fixed time with scheduled route chart.
RMC sources informed that the bulk waste generators including hotels, restaurants and other commercial establishments used to dump garbage in open, especially on roads, in absence of their own processing facilities.
This posed a huge challenge for the civic body as it was a cost incurring process to collect bulk waste from scattered locations. At times, the waste remained uncollected for days. Currently, three MCCs are operational in the city and four are ready for use.
Besides, three more MCCs are in the pipeline. While wet waste would be converted to manure, the dry garbage would be recycled. The plastic waste would be supplied to a cement manufacturer. Rourkela MLA and Sundargarh district planning committee chairman Sarada Prasa d nayak and RMC Commissioner Dibyajyoti Parida jointly launched the service. Parida said the dedicated vehicles would collect waste from 40 bulk garbage generators and take it to the MCCs.
For this service, the RMC would charge a nominal user fee. The RMC limits generates 75-80 tonne of wet waste and 50-55 tonne of dry garbage daily. Sources said there are plans to procure 10 battery operated vehicles for garbage collection from household source points in the first phase. With this, the RMC is expecting to improve its present national cleanliness ranking of 156.