Mysuru: Solid waste management in Mysuru is set to witness a major revamp within two or three weeks, thanks to the highly ambitious and well-intended project of the Mysuru City Corporation (MCC) called ‘WoW’ or ‘Wealth out of Waste.’ It aims to segregate garbage at the point of generation and pack it into different coloured bags for recycling. For this, the MCC has tied up with ITC Ltd., which has successfully implemented WoW in Bengaluru, twin cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad and Khammam district of Andhra Pradesh, Coimbatore district of Tamil Nadu and parts of Chennai. The MCC has recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the ITC and the project will see the light of the day in about two to three weeks from now. The project is a two-year-old ITC initiative to create public awareness about the concept of ‘Reduce-Reuse-Recycle’ to improve environmental hygiene and have a clean, green society. The objectives include educating masses for source segregation, generating less waste and recycling it more. Non-segregation of wet waste and solid waste (plastic) at source is a big headache for MCC. While the wet waste can be converted into compost, the dry waste is usually dumped in landfills. And most of the dry waste is not bio-degradable. Plastic is one such item. At present, most of the city residents do not segregate waste and they mix them while handing over the bags to the garbage collectors who come to their houses on a regular basis. This practice is despite the MCC providing two different containers to households. Even if the waste is separated and handed over, the garbage collectors mix them in their vehicles. This has made MCC’s job tough as it is impossible to segregate waste once it is mixed up. The result: Tonnes and tonnes of solid waste ending up at landfills.
