RAAC And ITC Joins Hands For Clean Kovai
B. Makrand (right), Chief Engineer, ITC, hands over the money for waste collected to a resident of Bharathi Colony cluster at the launch of ‘Wealth out of Waste’ programme organised by Residents Awareness Association of Coimbatore and ITC in Coimbatore on Sunday. Households and institutions in Bharathi Colony cluster, which consists of 14 residential areas in the city, will segregate paper and plastic waste and ITC Limited will buy it from them every month at Rs. 4.50 for a kg of waste paper and Rs. 6 a kg for waste plastic and metal items. This is part of the “Wealth out of Waste” (WOW) programme launched in the cluster on Sunday by the Residents’ Awareness Association of Coimbatore (RAAC) and ITC Limited. ITC will distribute blue and white bags free of cost to about 1,300 households in the area. The residents will collect dry paper waste and paper products in the white bag and plastic carry bags, broken toys, kitchen containers, milk packets and used mineral water bottles in the blue bag. ITC will make arrangements to collect the waste every month on fixed days. It will also pay the respective residential association 50 paise for every kg of waste collected.
Launching the project, D. Samuel Rajkumar, Chief Manager (Human Resources) of ITC, said that by segregating and collecting the paper and plastic waste, the volume of waste going to the streets was reduced. It also created awareness among the residents and turned the city clean.Further, about 2.5 tonnes of wood was needed to make one tonne of paper. By recycling the paper waste, the number of trees being cut down to make paper was also brought down. S. Murugesan, Senior Manager of ITC, said that about 300 tonnes of paper products were made every day at the company’s plant here. While 150 tonnes of waste paper needed for this was collected from cities such as Coimbatore, Chennai and Kochi, the rest were imported.
By launching the programme and collecting the waste paper from houses the company would be able to bring down the imports. ITC launched the programme in Hyderabad about a year ago and in Bangalore recently. C.R. Swaminathan, president of RAAC, said the amount paid for the waste paper and plastic would serve as an incentive for the public to segregate waste.
The Alagana Kovai project of the association aimed at making the city clean and beautiful. About one lakh cloth bags would be distributed to households on June 28 and 29 as part of the project.The association vice-president, G. Soundararajan, said that RAAC would be a facilitator in the WOW programme. As part of its “Alagana Kovai day” programme on June 28 and 29 it planned to involve school and college students and distribute cloth bags, sponsored by the Corporates here, to every household in the city and collect back the carry bags they had.
The waste thus collected would be turned into models of monsters and erected in the four zones in the city. This would create awareness among the public. A competition would be organised for college students to design the monsters. The association also planned to request trade bodies not to issue carry bags on June 29. Representatives of nearly 20 residential welfare associations in the city participated in the launch of the WOW project on Sunday.
