GARBAGE DISPOSAL-NEW INITIATIVES IN CHENNAI

Urban lives in India face the threat of overwhelming garbage accumulation near their dwelling places as most civic bodies do not have functional processing facilities for the huge waste generated day in and day out. While every citizen has a right to get the much needed civic services in return for the taxes paid by him, it is a matter of shame that these "receipts" are misused and mismanaged leading to a situation where the citizens are left to fend for himself whether it is water, power, roads, parking lots, parks or noise pollution or waste clearance. The audacity of the civic body in raising conservancy charges for those generating garbage is really breath taking as Chennai is a city where the all pervasive Coovum river stink hits any visitor who lands there! As the tax payers there are vigorously protesting this arbitrary move by the civic body, they are being asked to set up their own processing facility investing their funds! What a city! Here is a take on this latest development in Chennai and the on-going tussle between the tax payers and the civic body on the garbage issue.  

"Commercial establishments in the city are likely to set up their own bio-gas plants for processing their food waste.The Chennai Corporation, at a meeting in Ripon Buildings with representatives of hotels, marriage halls and other commercial food business operators asked the traders to commission decentralised waste processing facility based on a technology of Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC). The meeting was organised to resolve a deadlock on the issue of conservancy charges in Chennai. At the meeting, Corporation officials indicated that new conservancy charges levied on these establishments, which had been fiercely opposed by them, would be reduced if the traders' association commissioned their own plants based on such proven technology. A number of food-business operators, including large hotels and marriage halls, had been asked to pay more conservancy charges by the Chennai Corporation. The city has more than 20,000 commercial entities including large food-business operators and marriage halls that generate large amount of municipal solid waste every day. As the commercial establishments did not agree to the increase in conservancy charges by the Chennai Corporation, a series of meetings were organised over the past few months to resolve the deadlock. Commercial establishments that use 1,100 litre bins for conservancy were asked to pay Rs.1.31 lakh to the Chennai Corporation, according to the new proposal. Similarly, the establishments that use 120 litre bins were asked to pay Rs.14,600. The charges for marriage halls with a seating capacity of more than 1,000 were increased from Rs.12,000 to Rs.86,400 per year. BARC had already knocked on the doors of the Chennai Corporation to sell its garbage segregation technology and the civic body has suggested that commercial establishments use the indigenously-developed technology."

Garbage processing technology is readily available but its economic viability depends on the volume of waste generated. While a city with large population will have the wherewithal to invest on large processing plants and set up the infrastructure to distribute the products like power, manure etc, hotels, restaurants, marriage halls etc cannot be expected to generate regular garbage of required volume to sustain economically viable processing units, no matter how efficient the technology is. The Chennai civic body is trying to camouflage its utter inefficiency and lack of planning by passing on the responsibility to the tax payers! It is unfortunate that in a country like India there is no national policy on garbage management in urban townships with each one following its own unimaginative and ad hoc policies putting the tax payers at great disadvantage and inconvenience. It is time that major civic bodies in the country get together and evolve a uniform policy on garbage taxing and processing that is equitable to citizens, commercial establishments and the financial health of the city.

V.H.POTTY
http://vhpotty.blogspot.com/
http://foodtechupdates.blogspot.com

THE "TOXIC" SOCIETY!-POTENTIAL POISONS THAT LURK AROUND!

Does any one think as to how toxic is the environment where modern mankind live? Probably not! There is a fatalistic perception among the people that because of a "vigilant" government which is supposed protect its citizens from likely dangers faced by them from time to time, they need not be apprehensive about their well being. Unfortunately this very government can be an impediment in providing clean and safe foods and a safe environment. A classical example is the use of over 85000 industrial chemicals reported to be currently in use for one or the other purpose by the manufacturing sector with suspect safety credentials. This is in sharp contrast to rigorous testing regimes imposed on synthetic chemicals permitted to be used in food and drug by the respective industry. It is beyond one's comprehension as to how such a dangerous situation has arisen and why safety agencies, national as well as international, have not bothered to do any thing to alleviate the situation. Here is a take on the sorry situation that prevails in this field in spite of enormous data being generated by science on the safety of many of the industrial chemicals

In its history, the E.P.A. has mandated safety testing for only a small percentage of the 85,000 industrial chemicals available for use today. And once chemicals are in use, the burden on the E.P.A. is so high that it has succeeded in banning or restricting only five substances, and often only in specific applications: polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxin, hexavalent chromium, asbestos and chlorofluorocarbons. Part of the growing pressure to update federal rules on chemical safety comes from advances in the science of biomonitoring, which tells us more about the chemicals to which we are exposed daily, like the bisphenol A (BPA) in can linings and hard plastics, the flame retardants in couches, the stain-resistant coatings on textiles and the nonylphenols in detergents, shampoos and paints. Hazardous chemicals have become so ubiquitous that scientists now talk about babies being born pre-polluted, sometimes with hundreds of synthetic chemicals showing up in their blood. It often takes a crisis to draw attention to how little the government knows about industrial chemicals in circulation. After the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, at least two million gallons of chemical dispersants were spread to break up the slick. But federal officials could not say they were safe because minimal testing had been done. The current presumption that chemicals are "safe until proven dangerous" stands in marked contrast to how pharmaceuticals and pesticide companies are handled. Companies making these products have to generate extensive data demonstrating the safety of pharmaceuticals or pesticides before they are sold. This was not always the case. Pharmaceutical companies used to be able to sell drugs with minimal prior testing, but that changed after a drug called Thalidomide, given in the 1950s to pregnant women for morning sickness, was found to cause severe birth defects the public outcry helped push the medical field to take a precautionary approach to introducing new drugs.s.   

The specious argument by the chemical industry that such testing if made mandatory will cast a great onus on them to spend billions of dollars in scientific studies and naturally this will have adverse impact on the price front making these chemicals exorbitantly costly. To some extent their plea is understandable but such considerations ought not to come in the way of ensuring the safety of the society. Of course there are plenty of data available readily in the literature and government can always consider them provided those who use them collate the same and submit the same to safety agencies. There can be joint study teams which can vet these data to come to any meaningful conclusion. But it is inevitable that mankind has to face this challenge collectively without further obfuscation.      

V.H.POTTY
http://vhpotty.blogspot.com/
http://foodtechupdates.blogspot.com