Green Awards for 14 sectors today

Ramani KANGARAARACHCHI

Twenty seven Green Awards will be presented at the National Green Awards ceremony organized by the Central Environment Authority (CEA) which will be held at 7.00 pm at the BMICH today.

This will coincide with the 30th anniversary of the CEA. The awards will go to 14 sectors including textile, hotel, food and beverage, waste management and healthcare sectors at the awards ceremony where President Mahinda Rajapaksa will be the chief guest.

The biggest environmental issue in Sri Lanka today is identified as municipal solid waste management and the government has great interest in this subject at present, CEA Chairman Charitha Herath said.

Herath said this award scheme will be an alternative system to controlling pollution and greening the environment instead of the existing command and control approaches and education and awareness programmes.

He said CEA will use this competition mainly to control industrial pollution for greening the industries and finally end up with green environment.

This programe is based upon the competition among the same category of business to enhance environmental improvement islandwide with two criteria. Firstly, selected sectors of prescribed activities which have a high impact on National Environment by cumulated effects and other identified sectors such as schools, public and private sector institutions agriculture sector and waste management sector which make significant effect to the environment.