The household waste of the capital city Dhaka would have a better management system soon as the authorities concerned planned putting a technology in place to turn the daily garbage into some kind of treasure.
Department of Environment (DoE) has initiated a process to build two waste management plants which will effectively turn solid waste collected from different parts of the capital city into compost fertiliser.
The plants will be set up at a cost of Taka five crore under a waste management focused project called “3R (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle). The DoE will implement the project with support from the climate change trust fund.
“We have already selected the sites and completed soil test for the plants”, 3R Project Director Rahid Hossain told .
He said one of the plants will be in Matuail under Dhaka South City Corporation (DSCC) and the other one will be in Amin Bazar under Dhaka North City Corporation (DNCC). Each of the plants will produce 20 tonnes composed fertiliser per day from solid waste.
“We are hopeful about producing compost fertiliser from these plants by early next year,” Hossain said.
He said these plants would be a breakthrough towards fulfilling the present government’s commitment of establishing a sound solid waste management system in the capital city through making waste into assets.
After piloting the two projects, DoE will replicate the system across the country to manage waste efficiently for protecting environment, said the project director.
He said under the 3R project, the DoE would also build four waste transfer stations, two in Dhaka North City Corporation and two in Dhaka South City Corporation.
The DoE is also implementing another project titled “Clean Development Mechanism (CDM)” to set up waste-based compost fertiliser plants in all 64 districts.
Under the project, compost plants had already been set up in Rangpur, Mymensingh, Narayanganj and Cox’s Bazar, Hossain added.
“Our aim is to build composting units across the country to produce compost fertiliser using waste,” said Maqsood Sinha, managing director of Waste Concern, one of the technical advisory firms working for the DOE’s solid waste management system.
“Noting that more than 70 percent of municipal solid waste in Bangladesh is biodegradable (organic),” Sinha said, adding that there is enormous potential of converting organic waste into compost.
“This will improve waste management system and would also help obtain carbon co-financing”, he said.
Sinha sought some incentives from the government like leasing out land to private firms to set up compost plants.
“If we can’t make the waste recycling commercially viable, entrepreneurs won’t involve in the waste management business,” he said.
Referring that the Dhaka mega city produces more than 4,500 tonnes waste
per day, Sinha said there is no other alternative to make these waste into
assets for establishing a sound solid waste management system.
“If we look at the USA, Europe or Japan, we generate much less waste
compare to those countries. Our per capita waste generation is only 0.5-kg
per capita daily that is around three-kg in western world. But they are
managing their waste efficiently way with promoting recycling, he said.
For using waste efficiently at recycling plants, Sinha said, the
authorities concerned like city corporations under monitoring of DoE should
ensure that waste be segregated into ‘organic and ‘inorganic’ at the
collection points.
“A huge awareness campaign is needed to educate people about the benefit
of organic and inorganic waste segregation for recycling. Whenever, we can
make people understand that the recycling will give them financial benefit,
they will start practicing waste segregation”, Sinha said.
On pilot basis, the DoE in 2015 distributed 1.8 lakh bins with two
different colours to households at different parts of Dhaka city for
encouraging people to dump organic and inorganic waste separately.
