The Municipality of Nilgiris district in Tamil Nadu has come up with a new experiment. The experiment relates to the plastic wall project that will soon be turned into a solid wall by using a Gabion Mesh. The project initiated on June 5, 2020, on the occasion of ‘World Environment day’ is now 26. 75 meters with at least 12000 kg of plastic waste. The Coonoor municipality is now planning to cover it with a Gabion mesh so that it is fire and waterproof and can help in preventing landslides that are frequent in the area. It is further planning to construct more such walls in areas where landslides are frequent if this idea works.
Talking about the Plastic Wall, PM Malamurugan, sanitary Inspector at the Coonoor municipality, said, “Normally, we build walls with bricks, but these are built by soiled and other non-recyclable waste particles. Our Municipal Health Officer J Ragunathan suggested this idea. Plastics take approximately 120 years to decompose, so we thought why shouldn’t we experiment with this.”
As a part of the Swachh Bharat Mission after `Antiplastic Guidelines 2016, the Coonoor Municipality has been actively concerned in anti-plastic actions. The authorities declare that even before the ban of plastics in 2019, the municipality had taken a number of measures to curb the usage of plastics. They claimed that plastics contaminates groundwater and possess a threat to wildlife and hence they banned the sale of single-use plastic items including water bottles, soft drinks, and food items packed in plastic wrappers along the highways.
“We suggested the installation of ‘Heavy-duty Baling Machine’ in a meeting with the district collector. At least seven tons of waste in one shipment can be transported with a baling machine as compared to the manual method. So we brought in sponsors and an NGO named ‘Clean Coonoor’ joined us in establishing the machine at the municipal dump yard in Ottupattarai. A little over one lakh metric tons of dry waste has been handled in the past year because of this step,” told Ragunathan.
