Saji Thomas, Director, LahS Green India Pvt Ltd
Based on his organisation’s work with Maharashtra’s Mahad municipal council, Saji Thomas, Director, LahS Green India Pvt Ltd dives deep into the machinery, SOPs and challenges of urban solid waste management.
Scope of work
We work with the Mahad municipal council, an urban local body in Raigad, Maharashtra. The scope of work is to dispose of municipal solid waste through the appropriate scientific method on a daily basis.
The total waste generation of around 12 metric tons is from 12,000 households. The rest is from hotels, vegetable markets, flower markets, fish markets etc. The Mahad municipal council awarded the contract to us for the period from May 2020 to May 2023, to be renewed again.
Earlier situation
Earlier, the Mahad municipal council used to collect the municipal solid waste and transfer it to dumping yards which were beside the Savitri river. This led to problems such as attracting rats and flies to the open waste, wind shifts bringing foul odour to residents living close to the dump, burning garbage leading to black smoke, toxic by-products from burning rubber, and the garbage getting carried into water bodies during the rainy season.
Present SOP
We divide waste into three major categories: wet waste, dry waste and reject waste. The total quantity of wet waste as part of municipal solid waste is around 50%. To dispose of this, we are using a 2 tonne fully automatic Organic Waste Composting machine which is manufactured by us in technical collaboration with IIT Mumbai, and a biogas project of 5 MT capacity.
The dry waste is segregated into categories like plastic, rubber, glass, metal, paper, clothes, hard plastic etc. Dry waste like plastic, paper, rubber is stored in the form of bales, using a baling machine. The rest of the non-recyclable material which is in the form of reject waste is destroyed in the reject waste destructor.
ULB monitoring
Daily waste is weighed and recorded under the supervision of the AE/Assistants. An APP is given to all the stakeholders for getting to know the daily collection vs processing done. Apart from this, CCTV monitors are connected for all to see.
A WhatsApp group has been created with all the officers from the CEO downwards, where we share the daily morning and evening data and pictures with geotag and date/time.
