Corpn to collect garbage from houses with quarantined persons in yellow bags

According to a Chennai Corporation official, all the quarantined houses and the houses in the containment zones would be provided with yellow plastic sacks to store garbage. “Residents in those households should store their garbage in the sacks after disinfecting them with bleach. The garbage bags should be handed over to the conservancy workers,” the official said.

The civic body would incinerate the garbage collected from quarantined houses or bury them according to the quantity. If the garbage volume is huge, the civic body will incinerate them at its facility in Manali. Otherwise, the sacks will be buried in graveyards.

As of now, around 11,000 houses are kept under quarantine and more than 70 localities are announced as containment zones. On an average, the quarantined houses produce around 6 to 7 tonnes of garbage every day.

As the civic body is considering the garbage from quarantined houses as biomedical waste, the same would be disposed of immediately, hereafter. 

N Mahesan, Chennai Corporation chief engineer (solid waste management), said that the civic body would start distributing yellow sacks from Monday and orders have been placed to procure 2.25 lakh sacks.

“We will provide one sack to every quarantined house every day. We will also provide bleaching powder to the residents to sanitise the used masks, gloves and others before throwing them into the sacks,” Mahesan added.

The civic body also claims that it had already distributed personnel safety equipment to the conservancy workers.

Meanwhile, the Chennai Corporation has issued an advisory to the public on handling the waste aiming to prevent the disease. As per the advisory, residents in the quarantined house should disinfect masks and gloves with ordinary bleach or sodium hypochlorite solutions and store in the yellow bags separately. Residents in the non-quarantined houses should also disinfect masks and gloves and wrap them separately before handing over to the sanitary workers.