Hyderabad: Great potential to make organic manure in city

Hyderabad: Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) is said to be toying with a novel idea of tackling problems arising out of waste transportation. It is mulling over roping in NGOs for producing organic fertilisers with these pits.

Garbage collection is easy but transporting it to the dump yards through roads has become a challenge.

If community compost pitting process is taken up, Hyderabad would emerge a clean city, opines a garbage collector Swarna Latha from Yousufguda.

Explaining the need for community-based composting, M Ashwini, Environment Specialist, Serilingampally, GHMC, said, "The primary objective behind the concept of establishing community pits is to encourage solid waste management in an organic way, which also helps create wealth out of waste. Community-based composting will reduce time, efforts and challenges in waste management. We have initially started with Lingampally vegetable market and will be expanding our concepts further in a short span of time."

In community-based composting, two to ten waste producers can combine together to form a pit and make manure in an organic way the support of GHMC. Currently, Lingampally market is producing around 150 kg of wet waste every day and GHMC is converting it into manure and fertilizers and selling to farmers at a reasonable cost. Ashwini informed that recycling of waste takes 32 to 40 days and then the output will be ready for use.

As the same composting process cannot be applicable to bulk garbage creators like hotels and others, the government has imposed rules on them to follow on-site composting methods and hence the restaurants are using OWC (organic waste converter) machines to convert waste into wealth. But the fertilizers made through OWC can't be used in fields directly but and must be mixed with soil in a balanced ratio.