Initiative to keep Tezpur town garbage free

OUR CORRESPONDENT

TEZPUR: Radiant Skill and Environmental Solution Pvt Ltd, which came into existence in 2013, has been providing yeoman service in Tezpur town since 2018 so that Tezpur remains clean and green. Its motto is 'green love, green thought, green life', with special focus on keeping Tezpur town garbage-free. The organization, with 46 staff, collects wastes from 11, 230 households in 19 wards of the Tezpur town in 15 vehicles every day, takes it to the Marabharali disposal site and after segregating the waste, converts the wet wastes to organic compost and recycles the dry one.

Over 36 tonnes of waste are generated daily in the Tezpur municipal area and to store this waste, only 35 community bins are being used. As the number of community bins are few and distributed haphazardly without any planning, residents have no other alternative other than to deposit the waste along the roadside and in the open drains. The urban local body uses RCC bins and metallic containers to store the waste and 132 workers are engaged to handle the waste management task.

It is, however, seen that the sweeping crew collects the waste from roadsides and deposit it in the nearby community bins. To transfer the waste, vehicles like tractor-trailers, mini trucks and dumper placers are used, which collect the waste every day and carry it to the final disposal site located on the bank of the Marabharali, about 4 km away from the town. The collected waste is finally disposed off by simply dumping and land-filling processes. However, the conscious people here have expressed their concern over the process of open-air burning and the unscientific land filling of waste, which not only causes air pollution but also contamination of the ground and surface water in the nearby localities.

Talking to The Sentinel, CEO-cum-executive director of Radiant Environmental Solution Pvt. Ltd, Ashok Baruah said that as the door-to-door waste collection system had not been started till 2017 in the municipal area and being a responsible tax payer of the historic town, he felt that something different and beneficial should be done.

"Accordingly, with the support of Dr Ajai Kalandhar, from IIT Gwuahati and some positive-minded people, I conducted a survey to comprehend the character of waste generation in the Tezpur city and its adjoining areas and finally started my mission of collecting waste from every household in Tezpur town, which is then deposited at the Marabharali disposal site where I manage to turn it into profitable items. My team converts the wet waste (segregated) to organic compost and recycles the dry one. We are managing all this with our own money and the minimum possible mechanism. We have been producing organic compost at a high cost of production but are facilitating the people at a minimum rate only in the greater interest of motivating the people towards an organic world," said Baruah.

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