Raising a stink: The waste bomb is ticking across cities
residents of Bengaluru, Alappuzha, Pune, Panaji and Gurgaon and, most recently, Rani Khera in Delhi have put up stiff fights against attempts to open landfills in their backyards.
“We are comfortable in choosing a slum or a village to dump the garbage a city generates. We forget that the poor today are aware of their rights,” says Swati Singh Sambyal, programme manager at the Centre for Science and Environment.
That is why Delhi has no option but to continue dumping waste at Ghazipur even after the accident.
MISPLACED SOLUTIONS
As our increasingly frustrating search for new landfill sites continues, waste-toenergy plants are being touted as the only alternative. Unfortunately, neither is an effective solution to India’s garbage crisis. For one, the composition of India’s urban waste is not appropriate for incineration-based technologies.
“Untreated Indian mixed waste has so much moisture and debris (inert material) and hence so little calorific value that there is little, if any, surplus energy produced after consuming most of it in-house for plant operations,” says Almitra Patel, member of the Supreme Courtappointed Committee for Solid Waste Management.
She says the National Green Tribunal has specifically ruled against the feeding of untreated wet waste or recyclables to incinerators, adding that foreign firms that have few takers abroad for their ‘burn technology’ are tempting Indians with offers of mass-burning mixed waste.
Probably that is why many such plants are turning out to be duds.
In Pune, the municipality spent ₹20 crore in installing 25 low-capacity (twofive tonnes) waste-to-energy processing plants. Five of these are defunct and the rest, run below capacity. “We would like to burn and forget. But that’s not happening,” warns CSE’s Sambyal.
It’s time we got real.