Wednesday 24 April 2013

Ducks to break sullage

If the authorities of the Lalbagh Botanical Garden in Bangalore wanted to use grass for keeping the Lalbagh lake clean, can Mysore be far behind in using another equally innovative idea for keeping water clean.
The Department of  Horticulture had decided to use Khus grass, that grows in Lalbagh itself,  for cleaning up the polluted Lalbagh Lake. Now, the Mysore City Corporation (MCC) has adopted an equally new technique for use at its sewage treatment plant at old Kasare.
The MCC has borrowed the innovation from Tamil Nadu and it has deployed not trained personnel or sophisticated equipment but ducks to treat sewage water generated in the city.
The flapping of the ducks will save money on electricity bills for the MCC which runs in thousands.
The MCC purchased hundreds of swimming birds from Vellore and let them loose in sewage at one of the three ponds at the sewage treatment plant (STP) on Old Kesare.
The waddling ducks are expected to break up solids in the sewage to make it easy for the plant to treat the sullage.
The idea behind introducing the ducks are rather simple. When the ducks swim and flap their wings, the water begins churning naturally. This movement will break up the sullage and solid waste at the treatment plant.
When the waste floating atop the water is churned, it breaks up naturally into smaller particles and it is deposited at the bottom as silt.
The duck-sewage experiment was totally successfully in Tamil Nadu, and the same is being replicated by the MCC and this is the first such experiment in Karnataka.
The MCC has purchased 752 ducks and they have been supplied   by a Tamil Nadu agency specialising in treating water using water fowl.
These ducks have been released into one of the three ponds at the sewage treatment plant here, and more ducks are expected to join the flock in the coming days. Fresh fish and other meat are the dietary requirements of the ducks, and the environmental engineers at the MCC are now arranging this supply.
The MCC generally spends close to Rs 12 lakh in the form of electricity bills for operating its sewage treatment plants at Vidyaranyapuram, Rayankere and Old Kesare. The MCC says for the Old Kesare plant alone, it spent Rs 1.75 lakh to Rs 2.30 lakh as bills towards electricity. The MCC hopes to save a substantial chunk by making the ducks do now what the machines did earlier.
The rotors of the fans fixed at the base of the tank need electricity to churn water. The fan has 24 motors and the tank can hold 30 MLD of water.  
The motors are switched on depending on the quantity of water received at the sewage treatment plant. A minimum of six to a maximum of 16 motors are run round-the-clock.
The Kesare plant was commissioned in 2002 and it is the only non-chemical facility to treat water. The ponds at the STP here are divided into primary and secondary storage. After secondary stage, the treated water is released into a valley nearby, that is used mostly for gardening and agriculture purposes.
Earlier, the MCC had adopted Fermentative Anaerobic Baffle Reactor (FABR) technology after the establishment of STPs a new technology at the sewage treatment plants (STPs) at Sewage Farm in Vidyaranyapuram and Kesare off Bangalore-Mysore highway on an experimental basis to recycle domestic wastewater to save electricity consumption by up to 90 per cent and also to reduce sludge production.
The technology was to redress common complaints of foul smell emanating from the plants. The technology involves use of  organic Solutions’ Effective Micro-organisms (OS1), a liquid concentrate of specially cultured micro-organisms.
Once released into water, they live and work synergistically together, reducing organic matter

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