The Hindu Business Line : Waste management facility soon at Haldia

WEST Bengal is set to commission a modern hazardous waste management facility at Haldia. The first phase of the project will be completed in October this year. Commissioning of the second phase is expected to be over by April 2006.

The project, set up through private-public partnership, involves collecting the hazardous waste from different parts of the State with the help of specially-designed vehicles and incinerating the toxic elements after making possible recoveries.

The West Bengal Pollution Control Board (WBPCB) and the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests have contributed Rs 2 crore each towards the project. The rest will be invested by private sector units, which will provide their services to the industries against a fee.

Addressing an interactive session organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), Mr Ravi Kant, State special secretary for IT and former member secretary of WBPCB, said that the project was the third of its kind in the country after Mumbai and Hyderabad. Meanwhile, the State also has a modern bio-medical waste management facility at Howrah. Commissioned a couple of months ago, the project collects, treats, shreds and incinerates 10 tonne of biomedical waste generated by the hospitals in Kolkata, every day, against a fee.

Addressing the meeting Mr Sudip Bannerjee, the WBPCB's Chairman, said that the agency was increasingly getting tough on the polluting industries and had forced more than 200 errant industrial units to pull down their shutters.

In Kolkata, industrial pollution had come down from as high as 51 per cent to merely seven per cent in 2005. The latest pollution figures suggest that auto emission now contributes to 50 per cent of the suspended particle in air, followed by construction (30 per cent) and others (10 per cent).

"Industrial pollution in the city will drop further if CESC ceases to operate its coal-based Cossipore thermal power plant," Mr Bannerjee said.

"We have forced over 180 units in and around the city to switch over from coal to oil as a source of energy in the last two to three years. This has reduced emission of carbon-dioxide by 29,000 tonnes," he said. The Board is now planning to carry out similar exercises in Howrah and Greater Kolkata areas.

Mr Bannerjee, however, pulled up the industries in the State for not taking enough care of the environment.

Describing it as a fundamental duty of the industry, he said that except for ITC Ltd no other State industrial unit had a well-planned energy policy.

On the other hand, 118 industries in Maharashtra, 110 in Andhra Pradesh and 58 in Karnataka conformed to such standards.

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