The Chennai Corporation is all ready to auction more than 65,000 tons of trees which fell due to Cyclone Vardah, starting Monday. However, the dumping sites do not contain weighing bridges to calculate the total green waste, and the cleaning process in the city is still unfinished
A senior Chennai Corporation official told The New Indian Express that they have not weighted the garden garbage but the estimates were made based on the volume of the collection.
However, TNIE reported that the waste can bring in huge price in the market and without proper weighing machine and might lead to underselling of the fallen trees.
The routine waste in the city is dumped at Kodungalur and Perungudi dumpyards, moreover, 78 points across the city were earmarked for the public to dump only tree debris. Garden garbage from these places were brought and put at Velachery and Athipatu dumping yards.
The New Indian Express reported that nearly 700 tons of green waste was brought into these sites through 150 trips every day in last 10 days. However, the report states that there were no electronic weigh bridges at these sites and the workers have calculated the waste according to what they saw at the sites.
Later, the Corporation informed that they had collected 65,489 tons of tree debris in Chennai after Cyclone Vardah. A senior Corporation official said that the waste will be weighed at the nearest weigh bridges maintained by Corporation before they put it up on auction.
However, the Corporation has not finished the tree-cleaning process in the city and has promised to finish it off in the next 24 hours.
This story was first reported by Ram Sundaram and Nirupama Viswanathan from The New Indian Express.