Overloaded Central Effluent Treatment Plant (CETP) and lack of facilities to check pollution in the Tannery Industrial Park in Savar, green activists fear, will increase pollution in the coming days, which follows the reported mass collection of rawhides by the tanners after Eid-ul-Azha.
Media reports maintained this citing the activists even as they added even if the park has been established with the view to stop pollution at Hazaribagh, it is already creating pollution in a new area on the outskirts of capital Dhaka thanks to an overloaded CETP, which activists, reportedly, claim have become overloaded even before all the tanneries started operations in 2017 even if so far, around 139 tanneries are in operation in the park.
Meanwhile, speaking to the media, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) professor and head of civil engineering Md Delwar Hossain, who led a team of consultants in the tannery relocation project, reportedly, stated a test carried out by BUET has detected 3,100-milligram chromium in per litre water treated by the CETP, while adding that presence of less than 40-milligram chromium per litre of dissolved water is acceptable, and went on to claim that the tanners were not using adequate chemicals for wastewater treatment in CETP while some machinery had already become damaged resulting in the presence of excess chromium in dissolved water.
