About 45 minutes north of downtown Los Angeles, a machine the size of a small truck flattens tons of food scraps, paper towels and other household trash into the side of a growing 300-foot pile. To Waste Management which operates the landfill, this is more than just a mountain of garbage. Pipes tunnelled deep into the mound extract gas from the rotting waste and send it to a plant that turns it into electricity.

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.

Waste management company Greenstar has opened a new Euro 20m recycling facility in Bray, County Wicklow. The site will divert 135,000 tonnes from landfill every year and features an automated dry mix recyclables line to automatically separate aluminium and steel cans, paper, cardboard and plastics. Greenstar says the facility will be able to process 25,000 tonnes of commercial and household waste a year.

Around 41,000 staff, including sanitary workers, have been trained for the purpose A STANDARD protocol on handling and safe disposal of biomedical waste will be adhered to in all the primary, secondary and tertiary care government hospitals in Tamil Nadu, said V K Subbu Raj, Secretary, Health and Family Welfare, Government of Tamil Nadu. Addressing a seminar on hospital administration at the Tamil Nadu Dr MGR Medical University here on Tuesday, Subburaj said waste disposal management was crucial in the administration of hospitals.

Volunteers clean up the plastic mess left behind by unthinking tourists and visitors. The plastic is used by KK Plastic when laying roads with plastic in the bitumen mixture.

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.

The European Commission is taking Italy to court for failing to effectively resolve the waste crisis that has plagued Naples and the surrounding region of Campania. Piles of rubbish were left uncollected in the streets in spring 2007 and again in the winter, leading some frustrated residents to set fire to the waste. Although the crisis has eased since the appointment of a Waste Emergency Commissioner for the region, EU chiefs said the measures taken so far will not solve the crisis in the long term.

Defra has appointed a new radioactive waste management committee to cover the administration of waste across the UK and Northern Ireland. It will play a key role in the storage and disposal of radioactive waste, and be involved with the devolved administration in Northern Ireland on the implementation of geological disposal of higher activity waste. The Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM) has appointed Dr Rebecca Lunn and Professor Andrew Sloan to play a key role in scrutinising both Government's and the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority's plans.

The programme, to begin in July, will involve tie-ups with private parties through shredding, deep burial listing priorities: Special Secretary, Health and Project Director of Tamil Nadu Health Systems Project P.W.C. Davidar explains biomedical waste management at a workshop in Coimbatore on Thursday. The State is set to begin more scientific and safer disposal of biomedical waste generated in government hospitals, including those attached to medical colleges, and primary health centres with at least 30 beds.

Ministry of Environment & Forests (MoEF) in the Government of
India constituted a Task Force, under the chairmanship of Sh. R
H Khwaja, Additional Secretary in MoEF; in August, 2007 in view
of the exigency for ensuring environmentally sound disposal of
the used mercury-bearing lamps, particularly, with the
exponential rise in the demand for CFLs and, also, the thrust

Pages