Three spots have been selected to house the compactor machines that will compress the township’s garbage before sending it off to the dumping yard. 

Salt Lake generates around 40 metric tonnes of solid waste everyday and its dumping yard, Mollar Bheri, is fast filling up. So the civic body had planned to purchase three compactor machines, that would squeeze all the water out of the rubbish and shrink it. The Telegraph Salt Lake had reported this in the article “Leash for the garbage demon”, published on January 30. 

The government has now released the required Rs 1.92 crore for the project and the sites have been allotted too. 
“There will be a compactor for all the three sectors of Salt Lake. The Sector I compactor will be put up on the banks of the Kestopur Canal between AD and AE blocks. The Sector II machine will be kept near Kathgola Island, between AH and AJ blocks, and the Sector III machine will be set up adjacent to Central Park, diagonally opposite Bidhannagar Municipality School in FE Block,” said Debashish Jana, chairman-in-council member in charge of conservancy, sewerage and drainage. “The compactors have a capacity of 16 tonnes and will be able to reduce the volume of waste to around 12 tonnes.”

The municipality is holding out a promise to segregate the waste before feeding the machine. So garbage trucks and cycle vans that go door-to-door picking up waste will go and empty their vehicles next to the machine. Workers will then manually separate the trash into three parts: biodegradable waste (including food), construction waste and e-waste (such as compact discs and computers). At present, there is no segregation done for the township’s waste.  The three will be compressed separately by the machine and then sent to the dumping yard to be dealt with accordingly. 

While the compactors should arrive by the end of the year, work will soon commence on building their shelters, connecting them to the sewerage lines for the water to drain out etc. 

But it is doubtful if the workers would be able to do the segregation. “Now we generally dump waste in the lorries that carry them to the dumping ground. Nobody has told us how waste can be segregated or where it is to be done — at point of collection from the houses or at Mollar Bheri. We have no idea whether all kinds of waste are suitable for the compactors or not. I thought it’s a machine where you just go and dump all the waste that has been collected,” said a conservancy worker who did not wish to be named.