Author: Senta Berner

The KCC Awareness Center is ready to open its doors to the public! Over the last year, the Awareness Center Team has been building expertise in public engagement and compiling research results from the SCIP Plastics project to present at the centre. Now, we are happy to announce the Awareness Center Open Days. First, every second month, and later every month, we will open our doors and invite a specific stakeholder group to join us in the centre and discuss waste management, plastic pollution prevention, and solutions for a cleaner and healthier Khulna. On 30.04.2024 and 07.07.2024, we successfully carried out our first two test runs with stakeholders at KCC and schools and colleges.

Opening the Awareness Center to the public is critical in fulfilling our mission to create a central contact point in Khulna, fostering connections among waste management practitioners and experts beyond the SCIP Plastics project. Through raising awareness and facilitating mutual learning, we aim to empower stakeholders and spread the research outcomes of SCIP, contributing to effective waste management practices in Khulna and the region.

We were excited to facilitate a visit of our KCC key stakeholders, Mr Abir Ul Jabbar (Head of the Planning Department) and Ms Nurunnahar Anni (Conservancy Officer), to the German project partners in Weimar and Frankfurt and the IFAT trade fair in Munich.

Capacity building without a common understanding is challenging: waste transfer stations look different in Germany from the ones in Bangladesh. When colleagues in Bangladesh envision a waste sorting facility, their ideas might differ from what the German team understands. Thus, the visit of our KCC partners was an excellent opportunity to visit solid waste infrastructure in Germany and discuss differences, similarities and possible applications in Bangladesh. Highlights included the excursion to the composting plant in Umpferstedt close to Weimar and the residual waste treatment plant in Halle-Lochau.

The trip through Germany from 10.05. to 16.05.2024 ended with a visit to the IFAT trade fair in Munich. Together, we explored the latest inventions and applications in solid waste collection, sorting, composting and recycling.

Aerial images are a great tool to survey any physical infrastructure. In the SCIP Plastics project, we have been using drones to survey and assess the Rajbandh final disposal site. In case of this open disposal site, drone images are critical, since not all sections of the site are safe to access. The images can help to determine the expanse of the waste body over time, to spot any waste leaks (solid and liquid) into the surrounding area, and oversee construction measures happening at the site.

Here are two drone images from March 2023 (left, © Florian Wehking) and April 2024 (right, © Noor Alam). We can clearly see how much closer the waste body moved towards the boundaries, especially in the north. Furthermore, a new larger leachate pond has emerged in the south-eastern corner just outside the boundary of the site. This is a concerning development and illustrates the need to improve containment measures at the site. The project team of Working Group III (lead: Pangkaj Kumar Mahanta) is currently working on improving embankments and the fence line.

After seeing how useful these drone images can be, we now started to use them in the urban environment to survey the state of secondary transfer points and stations in Khulna city. To create a baseline, on the 30th March 2024 we started with the open transfer stations. Here are the images of Boyra Azizer STS (left, © Noor Alam) and KDA Mosque STS (right, © Noor Alam).

Currently, we are developing operational guidelines and containment measures to reduce the spreading of plastic waste from transfer points and stations. Drone monitoring will be used to evaluate the impact of these measures.

Overall, the recent surveys illustrated that drones can be a great tool for city cooperations and public institutions to monitor and assess solid waste management infrastructure. The SCIP Plastics project has already developed basic standard operating procedures for the monitoring and will test these over the next months.

“You cannot manage what you do not measure!” is the motto of the hour. To put any waste management infrastructure planning on solid footing, we need reliable data. Up to now, waste quantities have been approximated by maximum truck payload. This might have led to an overestimation of waste generation in Khulna. We will soon find out! The SCIP Plastic project is currently constructing a platform at the entrance of the Rajbandh final disposal site. Here, we will carry out a truck monitoring with a mobile truck scale. Construction is well under way and we are optimistic to conduct our first weighing campaign in June 2024.

Over the last year, WG III investigated various processes and activities at the Rajbandh open dump site, the only active final waste disposal site for Khulna city. Now, the team will start monitoring and quantifying plastic emissions in the form of wind-blown litter and washed-out material. On 13.11.2023, the WG III team, Pangkaj Kumar, Salahuddin Setu, Tasnova Imam, Saptarshi Mondal and Senta Berner visited the disposal site and outlined a first monitoring protocol, as well as necessary improvements along the fence line and embankments to ensure quantifiable sample collection. The team also tested a drone which will be part of the monitoring, especially to gauge the impact of extreme weather events on waste body movement and plastic emissions.

On the 9th of November 2023, the civil engineering faculty of KUET inaugurated their new research hub building. The building will host the SCIP Plastics Knowledge Transfer Hub, including all working group members and the Waste Lab. Prof. Eckhard Kraft and Gregor Biastoch joined the celebration as special guests and speakers in the inauguration panel.
The hub building and its facilities are fully dedicated to the research field of solid and plastic waste management showing KUET’s commitment to address this issue in the coming years.

The 3rd Board of Directors meeting was hosted by the CUET SCIP-team and took place in Cox’s Bazar on the 4th of November. The project leaders, Prof. Eckhard Kraft (BUW), Prof. Farzana Zuthi (CUET), Prof. Rafizul Islam (KUET) and Mr. Abir Ul Jabbar (KCC), as well as scientific experts reviewed and discussed the project progress presented by the working group leads and heads of the waste lab and awareness center. As an extraordinary member of the scientific expert panel, Prof. Jörg Londong (BUW) gave valuable insights to further improve project outputs.