WBPCB to give electric vehicles to 125 urban local bodies for garbage collection

Kolkata: The West Bengal Pollution Control Board (WBPCB) will hand over electric vehicles for garbage collection and disposal to all 125 urban local bodies across the state to curb pollution.

The e-vehicles will go door to door for collection of garbage and will take the same to an earmarked spot, from where it will be loaded in vehicles to be transported to the

dumpsites.

"We have set a target to hand over 1000 e-vehicles to the urban local bodies in phases so that each of the civic bodies will have at least 7 vehicles. We have plans to give 500 such vehicles in the first phase," Rajesh Kumar, Member Secretary of WBPCB, said.

The West Bengal Pollution Control Board has asked all the ULBs to take measures for segregation of waste at source.

The Municipal Affairs department has supplied more than 10 lakh bins already to the municipalities. The municipalities are supplying 2 bins of separate colours to each household so that people can dump dry waste and wet waste separately.

The wet waste or kitchen waste can be converted into compost while the dry waste that includes plastic, metal, glass etc can be

recycled.

Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority (KMDA) has started work for bio-mining of legacy waste in 6 municipalities in the state with the target of removal of legacy waste and reclaiming of the land for curbing pollution. The state government has designated KMDA as the nodal agency to execute the National Green Tribunal's directions in respect of removal of legacy waste from 69 dumpsites in the same number of municipality areas. The state generates around 62 million tonnes of solid waste annually.

The legacy waste will be put into a trammel machine for segregation into 2 major components – waste comprising leaves, plastic etc usable as Refuse Derived Fuel (RDF) that can be used in cement factories as an alternative to fuel, and inert waste—that can be used as soil conditioner.

There are 88 dumpsites across the state as reported to NGT and some of the civic bodies like Kolkata, Bidhannagar, Asansol, Durgapur have individually taken up initiatives for removal of the legacy waste.