By Maheesha Mudugamuwa The Colombo Municipal Council (CMC) will need to spend over Rs. 1 billion to transport garbage from Colombo to Aruwakkalu in Puttalam until a rail transport system in finalised. The CMC said that it will need to spend Rs. 150 million a month till next March to transport garbage to Aruwakkalu. Municipal Commissioner Palitha Nanayakkara told The Sunday Morning that the Council would have to send at least 20 tipper trucks per day and that each tipper would contain 10 metric tonnes of garbage. “The cost per tipper is around Rs. 100,000,” he said, adding that the CMC had to hire the tippers from outside as it did not have its own to transport garbage. The process of transporting garbage from Colombo to Aruwakkalu commenced on 8 August. The move to transport garbage to Aruwakkalu commenced prematurely after dumping garbage at the Kerawalapitiya dumping site was suspended as the site had exceeded its limit. The Ministry of Megapolis and Western Development said that the Kerawalapitiya dumping site was used as a temporary alternative to address the garbage issue in Colombo. The Ministry said that while garbage was to be dumped at the site for only a year, it had been used as a garbage dumping site for over two years. When contacted, the Head of Metro Colombo Solid Waste Management Project Sarath Bandara said that the final plan was to transport garbage from Colombo to Aruwakkalu by train. However, he said that the infrastructure was not yet in place, so the garbage would need to be transported using trucks. He said that the construction of the Aruwakkalu Sanitary Landfill had not yet been completed but was ready to accept garbage at a rate of 600 tonnes per day. Currently, there was a capacity for 240 days. However, the construction is still ongoing, he added. “About two weeks ago, we received about 12 dump trucks but there was a problem and they stopped sending garbage. They started sending garbage again from 8 August,” Bandara said. So far, around 500 tonnes of garbage had been deposited, he added. The decision was taken due to the suspension of garbage being dumped in Kerawalapitiya since 5 August by the Megapolis and Western Development Ministry as the facility’s capacity to accommodate garbage exceeded its limits. According to the statistics, 550 MT of garbage accumulates within the Colombo city limits on a daily basis. Accordingly, three times that or approximately 1,650 MT of garbage within the Colombo city limits has accumulated during the past three days without being collected or disposed of.