Bengal plans waste processing in all municipal areas, step to stop unplanned dumping
Telegraph | 2 April 2025
The Bengal government is working on a plan to begin waste processing in all municipal areas of the state and has invited agencies interested in the work for a pre-tender conference in April.
The move comes close on the heels of a landslide in Howrah’s waste disposal ground that experts blamed on unplanned dumping.
The hillocks were about 45m high.
Waste management experts said they should not have exceeded 25m. Piling waste above old waste without recycling enlarged the mounds and hardly left any space to throw fresh waste.
The picture is common across the state. Nearly all the dump sites where the municipal bodies throw the waste are filled to the brim, including the Dhapa waste disposal ground in Calcutta.
There are 128 civic bodies — municipal corporations and municipalities — in Bengal. Only about 15 municipal bodies segregate some, not all, of the waste generated within their boundaries.
This means 88 per cent of municipal bodies in the state have yet to start any waste segregation at source and waste processing.
“We are now trying to start segregated waste collection and waste processing in 108 municipal areas. In five municipal bodies, the work cannot be started because of land paucity,” said an official of the state urban development and municipal affairs department.
“Some of the municipalities that collect segregated waste from some wards and also process some of it are Baidyabati, Uttarpara-Kotrung, Sreerampore, Rishra, South Dum Dum, North Dum Dum, New Barrackpore, Baranagar and Haldia. The Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC), the largest municipal body that has much better infrastructure than others, also processes some of the waste generated,” the official added.
The biodegradable waste, including food and kitchen waste, can be used as raw material for composting or producing biogas.
Non-biodegradable waste like plastic, paper, glass and metals can be used in the recycling industry.
The official said they advertised the pre-tender conference across the country and were expecting agencies with experience in solid waste handling from other cities to come.
Tenders for the work will be floated later.
“We may form clusters of municipal bodies and hand over the waste processing of different clusters to separate agencies,” said the official.
Brajesh Dubey, a professor of civil engineering at IIT Kharagpur, said only the waste that cannot be used to prepare a new product should go to the waste disposal ground.
“Despite best efforts, about 10 to 12 per cent of waste will be ineligible for processing. This may include waste like plastic that got mixed with food waste and dust. Only this waste should reach a waste disposal ground. Everything else should be processed,” said Dubey, who specialises in solid waste management and is wwadvising some municipal bodies in Bengal on improving their waste management mechanisms.
Metro reported on March 27 that the municipal bodies around Calcutta — New Town Kolkata Development Authority, Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation and Howrah Municipal Corporation — hardly process their waste.
Only New Town processes 15 per cent of the collected waste. The others don’t even do that.
Dubey said that without waste segregation and waste processing, the authorities have to look for fresh waste disposal grounds every few years, an impossible task in cities that keep expanding.
When a bulk of the waste is used as raw material to create a new product, the volume of waste going to the disposal ground reduces. This increases the life of a waste disposal ground.
Bengal also has only one sanitary landfill site at Baidyabati, which has impermeable layers spread over the waste disposal ground.
This does not allow the leachate (any contaminated liquid that is generated from water percolating through a solid waste disposal site) to percolate down the soil and reach the groundwater.
There are pipes to collect the leachate and the methane gas that generates smoke in waste disposal grounds.