06/06/2006
Source: www.ndtv.com

Namakkal - the poultry capital of India - has been a zero garbage town for the past four years. There are no dustbins in this little town in Tamil Nadu. That is because garbage collection is a private effort. Every morning close to 200 sanitary workers are on the streets and at everyone's doorstep. The residents are ready with their garbage segregated into organic, recyclable and inorganic wastes. This routine holds for holidays as well - sixty tonnes of garbage is collected each day and nothing remains on the streets. “Whatever is biodegradable we put them separately, others like milk cover and paper we take away,” said Maniyamma, a sanitary worker.

Free service..

The service comes absolutely free with no funding from either the state or the centre. It is hard to find any litter on the streets all because of enormous public awareness. People are only too willing to cooperate because they say the project has improved their quality of life. Now they have understood to make their atmosphere clean. “Earlier we used to have garbage littered everywhere, now things have completely changed. Now we like this clean environment,” said another worker.

It is this vermicompost unit run by a private group at the civic dump yard that has made this solid waste management project a success. It converts sixty percent of the waste into wealth. And earthworms do all the work - transforming vegetable waste into vermicompost in forty days.

Commercial proposition..

Vermicompost is a good commercial proposition too, a ton of vermicompost fetches upto five thousand rupees “If this could be done in a big way, vermicompost would dispose off most of the garbage and we could create a clean town, clean city and a clean world,” said Senthilkumar of Annamalai Env Protection Trust.

The Supreme Court has applauded Namakkal as a role model and the municipality has also secured ISO 14001 certification for environmental management. Certainly it is an example of solid waste management and worth emulating across the country for cleaner towns and cities.