Set up debris bank in City, BDA told

By Our Staff Reporter

BANGALORE, MARCH 3. With Bangalore developing rapidly and extensively, the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) and other agencies should seriously consider setting up a ``debris bank'' to manage the copious quantities of building debris that is piling up in the City, Mr. A.N. Yellappa Reddy, environmentalist and former Special Secretary, Environment, said here on Saturday.

Inaugurating a seminar on ``Eco-friendly approaches to solid waste management'', Mr. Reddy said solid waste management was a global concern, and poor planning, lack of checks and balances, increasing consumerism and rising population made it difficult to tackle.

``However, it should be so, because, at a simplistic level, urban waste is a major source of organic manure and there is immense potential in the extraction of manure from urban waste,'' he said. At the same time, with much of urban waste coming from excessive use of non-biodegradable material, it could no longer be safely concluded that urban waste was less hazardous than industrial waste, he said.

Mr. Reddy said since solid waste was a man-made problem, the solution too lay in human endeavour. He urged the voluntary sector to facilitate an efficient system of urban waste management and suggested that senior citizens, and retired persons who had the time should be involved in effecting a working urban waste management system.

Ms. Tara A. Sharma, advisor, Royal Norwegian Embassy, released the book, Colour Green, brought out by the Centre for Environment Education under the Integrated Urban Environment Improvement Project of the BDA, being implemented by the CEE. The book would help gardening enthusiasts choose the right kinds of trees to be grown in urban areas.

Ms. Sharma, who appreciated the model of urban waste management being implemented by the CEE and the BDA, said it was not working as well in Himachal Pradesh. The Indo-Norwegian Environment Programme had eight projects in Karnataka and the urban waste management was the most successful one, she said.

The BDA Commissioner, Mr. Jayakar Jerome, said one of the reasons why such projects made slow progress was public apathy. There was no participation from the public, and this was a demotivating factor for the government agencies and the NGOs, he said.

The seminar was intended to share the experiences of NGOs, entrepreneurs and others and to provide a platform for information-sharing among stake-holders. It aims at creating a network of citizens' groups, NGOs, urban local bodies and researchers to evolve feasible methodologies for community-based composting and standardisation, quality control and marketing of compost, apart from capacity building of resident association groups.

The programme was organised by the BDA, the CEE and the University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore, and sponsored by the INEP.

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