Residents of a few pockets in the Okkiyam Thoraipakkam village panchayat, have been suffering due to the round-the-clock burning of plastics, kitchen waste and other forms of garbage. The village panchayat is among the 25 rural local bodies of St. Thomas Mount Panchayat Union (also called St. Thomas Mount Block). On the city's fringes and located off Rajiv Gandhi Salai or Information Technology Corridor, it has been witnessing massive development in construction of software and residential complexes.

Britons may have to pay

If everything goes well, the Model Colony ward of the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) could become a 'model' before the other municipal wards for making use of the discarded garbage for a 'powerful' cause. The municipal body is planning to generate electricity by setting up a biogas plant that will use the garbage within the Model Colony ward as its fuel input and run the streetlights in the ward with the electricity generated.

The ambitious plan to decentralise the garbage disposal at four different places in the city received a boost with the forest department finally giving its approval to set up a garbage disposal plant in Punawale. This will enable the city to have four garbage disposal plants in different parts of the city as against the present system of the lone dumping ground at Urali Devachi village.

Non-removal of waste from the South Goa Planning and Development and the adjoining acquired land prompted some vendors to set tones of waste afire on Wednesday evening. The vendors maintained that the Margao Civic body has been irregular in clearing the waste, which gives a bad look to the mega market, visited by thousands of customers every day. This is not the first time that the Margao Civic body has failed to clear the waste from the market despite payments made by the PDA.

The tug of war between the Goa State Urban Development Agency (GSUDA) and the Corporation of the City of Panjim (CCP) over "who will cap the Curca garbage dump?' may have ended but the work of capping the dump is yet to start though the monsoon is not far away. The work had to be completed before the monsoons to ensure that polluted water does not reach Curca village. The CCP which has been directed by the High Court, last week, to cover the garbage dump with tarpaulim before the monsoon of 2008, has not been able to start the work for want of funds.

The situation at the Sonsodo garbage dump yard is slowly but surely heading towards unmanageable proportions, even as Curtorim MLA Reginaldo Lourenco has threatened to stop garbage dumping at the site if the government fails to work out a solution immediately. A month have gone since Hyderabad-based Hyquip Project signed an agreement with the government to set up the garbage treatment plant at Sondoso with the in vessel technology, but the plant is yet to take shape at the yard.

Guwahati Press Club has decided to study the problem of garbage management in Northeast with special reference to biomedical wastes. This was stated in a press release. This is a known fact that Guwahati is the crowded city with a population of nearly 20,00,000 and produces heaps of garbages everyday. More over, the city has emerged as a health care hub for the state as well as for the seven neighbouring states serving more than three crore people. One can easily imagine the quantity of hazardous biomedical wastes that the hospitals and pathological labs produce in a single day.

AN OFF-DUTY policeman trawling for fish, not felons, helped net a Chinese shipping company whose vessel dumped garbage in Port Phillip Bay. In the first prosecution by the Environment Protection Authority for garbage pollution in Victorian waters, the company and the ship's former master were yesterday penalised a total of $52,000. Hong Kong-based Tian Ren Company Ltd and captain Zhu Hanjie, 43, since sacked over the incident, were charged after now Inspector Glenn Davies saw a large plastic bag fall from the container ship Sky Lucky on January 19 last year.

Preventing a disease disaster in Myanmar is now a "race against time," as many impoverished victims still await help a week after the brutal cyclone, experts warned Saturday. Reports of diarrhoea and skin problems already have surfaced, and health officials fear waterborne illnesses will emerge because of a lack of clean water, along with highly contagious diseases such as measles. Children, especially those orphaned by the storm, face some of the greatest risks.