Waste of energy
Controversy mars India's ambitious target of generating 800 MW of energy by burning waste. Ironically, the country does not even generate appropriate waste to sustain these waste-to-energy plants
India is hell-bent on investing in waste-to-energy plants that use flawed technology
ON MARCH 23, over 300 South Delhi residents organised one of the largest openchain rallies to protest against the Okhla waste-to-energy
(wte) plant. Their grouse was that the plant, located in the heart of the city to generate electricity from municipal waste, is spewing toxic fumes, filling the atmosphere with stench and making people ill. More than 1 million people live in the residential colonies that surround the plant.
“The number of asthma patients
admitted to emergency and intensive care units has gone up since the plant was set up,” says Shailendra Bhadoriya, consultant cardiologist, Fortis Escorts Heart Institute, one of the three hospitals in the plant’s vicinity. Vinayak Malik, secretary of Sukhdev Vihar Welfare Association, one of the residential colonies closest to the plant, alleges that every day open trucks transport toxic ash and discarded waste from the plant to the Okhla landfill site 8 km away. “If the government does not act immediately,
we will boycott the Lok Sabha elections,” he says.
The Okhla plant, like most wte plants in the country, has remained controversial since its inception. In 2009, a public interest petition was filed in the Delhi High Court against the plant proposal. But it was still commissioned in 2011. “Doctors and residents highlighted the inevitable environmental consequence of having a plant that basically burns waste. Yet, the court gave the project a go-ahead,” says Ranjit Devraj, a resident of Sukhdev Vihar and member of the Supreme Court-appointed committee on waste management set up in 2018. Now, the plant is increasing its capacity from 16 megawatt (MW) to 40 MW.
India is betting high on wte plants. The niti Aayog has a target of constructing wte plants with total capacity of 330 MW in 2017-18 and another 511 MW in 2018-19 under the Swachh Bharat Mission. It has also proposed the Waste to Energy Corporation of India, a nodal agency to set up plants through public-private partnership. In September 2017, the National Thermal Power Corporation invited developers to set up 100 wte plants in the country.
The government’s enthusiasm in
wte is not shared by many. “Why is the government planning backwards when it comes to waste management? Initially, it focused on landfills and now, after widespread protests, the focus has shifted to wte plants,” says Shibu Nair, director, Thanal, a think tank based in Thiruvananthapuram which trains communities on zero waste management. The government should instead focus on minimising and segregating waste at source and then compost and recycle the waste.
“wte should be the third step in the waste process where only rejects, such as rubber tyres, multi-layer plastics and paper, are sent. The last step is a sanitary landfill site,” he says, adding that the government is rooting for wte plants because it is the easiest way to give the impression that something is being done.
India’s experience with wte plants has been unsatisfactory. The country’s first wte plant was set up in 1987 in Timarpur, Delhi. The `20 crore-plant ran for just 21 days before it was shut down due to poor quality of incoming waste, says a paper by Dharmesh Shah, who works as a policy advisor to Global Alliance for Incinerators Alternatives (gaia). The project was officially scrapped in July 1990 after a Comptroller and Auditor General inquiry, ordered by the Delhi High Court, found that the government had spent `1.25 crore on maintaining and insuring the inoperative plant. Since then, 14 more wte plants of 130 MW capacities have been installed in the country. Out of these, half have already been closed down and the remaining are under scrutiny for environmental violations (see ‘A great gamble’, p26).
Hard sell
Amsterdam, the capital city of the Netherlands, has one of the biggest incinerator-based wte plants in the world, which treats about 4,400 tonnes of waste every day and has an electricity efficiency rate of over 30 per cent, the highest in the world. It produces 1 million megawatt-hour of electricity and up to 600 giga joules of heat annually, which is enough to service 0.32 million houses in the city. There are over 2,450 wte plants in operation worldwide, with a capacity of around 330 million tonnes of waste per year.
There are three peculiar reasons behind failure of wte plants in India. The first is the quality and composition of India’s municipal waste. Most cities in India still collect unsegregated waste, which has high moisture content (around 50 per cent) and low calorific value (the amount of heat or energy produced when waste is burnt). The calorific value of the mixed waste in some of the wte plants is so low that they use additional fuel to burn. The calorific value of waste in India is 1,4112,150 kcal/kg, as per To Burn or Not to Burn: Feasibility of Waste to Energy Plants in India, a report recently published by Delhi-based non-profit Centre for Science and Environment
(cse). Waste should at least have 1,800 kcal/kg for self-sustaining combustion. Garbage in Sweden, Norway and the US, which have successful wte plants, ranges between 1,900-3,800 kcal/kg. The cse report adds that low calorific