Public health: Waste dumping won’t be easily stopped

Pollution penalty far cheaper than installing treatment plants for factories.


Sonia Malik May 15, 2011

LAHORE:


The cases of 58 factories dumping untreated waste into Charrar drain will go to an environmental tribunal within 15 days, but any penalty is unlikely to convince the owners of these factories to quickly set up waste treatment plants, The Express Tribune has learnt.


The tribunal can fine the factories up to a million rupees, said Environmental Protection Department (EPD) spokesman Naseemur Rahman.

The cost of installing a treatment plant runs into several millions of rupees, said the owner of a dyeing factory that has been charged with dumping untreated waste. “It’s far cheaper to pay the fine than to invest in a treatment plant,” he said on condition of anonymity.

He said that the Irrigation Department charged each factory Rs11,000 a year to dump waste into the drain. “Maybe they should build treatment plants for us,” he said.

The factory owner said that washing units required what he called a primary treatment plant costing about Rs1 million. But dyeing units, he said, required a primary plant as well as a secondary plant that cost over Rs10 million.

Shagufta Rahman, the EPD director general, conceded that the movement of the 58 cases to the tribunal over non-compliance with the department’s environmental protection orders (EPOs) was unlikely to keep factories from dumping untreated waste anytime soon. It would take a few years for the factory owners to agree to install waste treatment plants, she said.

The EPD last year issued notices to 102 factories, most of them related to textiles, for dumping untreated waste in the drain. Two of these have now installed plants, 30 shut down and 52 continued to dump waste. The rest had turned out to be garment stitching units that were not discharging hazardous waste.

Three EPD teams recently collected some 40 water samples from Charrar drain, which is about 19km long and runs from the airport to Ferozepur Road. Kamran Tufail, a field officer, said he was certain that the samples were contaminated with both microbes and chemicals, but the test results would be available in five days. He said that the dyeing factories were more dangerous polluters than washing units.

Kausar Firdous, a fresh water research consultant, said that the heavy metals used in dyes can cause cancer if ingested by humans. The metals can be transferred to the food supply from polluted irrigation water.

Four hundred and seventy five factories dispose of untreated waste in Hadyara drain, from where it eventually flows into the River Ravi. Some 350 of these 475 units are situated in the Quaid-i-Azam Industrial Estate.

EPD Secretary Sajjad Saleem Hotiana, meanwhile, has called a meeting with the factory owners and the Irrigation Department secretary to discuss the possibility of installing a waste water treatment plant where Charrar drain joins Hadyara drain.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 15th, 2011.

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