Pune Municipal Corporation’s waste-to-green energy project in Hadapsar is limping
Umesh Isalkar, TNN | Aug 29, 2013, 06.57 AM IST
PUNE: The Pune Municipal Corporation’s (PMC) waste-to-green energy project from processing garbage in Hadapsar has run into trouble.
Mumbai-based Rochem Separations Systems (India) Pvt Ltd, which was operating the plant on a build-operate-transfer basis to process 700-tonne dry waste and generate 10 MW electricity every day, has failed to run to its full capacity. It has led to the piling up of garbage and rejected material being dumped in the open in the plant’s backyard, close to residential areas.
Activists have demanded that the project be scrutinised by an experts’ committee. They claimed that the company had not only violated environmental norms, but also flouted clauses of the agreement with the civic body that can attract a huge penalty.
President of Pune-based Nagrik Chetana Manch Maj Gen (retd) SCN Jatar claimed that the project is a complete failure. The PMC gave the contract for generating electricity from 700 tonne per day to Rochem in 2010.
“The plant uses gasification/pyrolysis technology to generate electricity from waste. Reports in the foreign press regarding gasification technology raise doubts because the plant in Ramtekdi is not functioning at full capacity even after the company got the authorisation from the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board (MPCB) in May 2011. It is supposed to process 700 metric tonne waste every day, but in reality it processes up to 200 metric tonne,” Jatar said.
He also doubted the plant’s electricity generation. “The civic body says the plant does not generate any electricity. But MPCB officials had mentioned in their visit report (March 15, 2013) that generation of 1.5 MW electricity was used to run the plant. This is confusing. As per the documents sought under the Right to Information Act, 2005 the company fitted gas engines of 2.6 MW capacity in September 2012. But when I visited the plant, the engines were not working,” Jatar said.
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The project has been mired in controversies from the beginning, Jatar said. “As per the check list on the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board website, the distance of human habitation from the plant site is to be 500 m under the Air and Water Acts, but the site is right next to two huge residential complexes. Additionally, garbage and rejects are being dumped in the open. These are major health hazards,” Jatar said.
Representatives of Hill Side residential complex said, “The distance between the Rochem garbage processing plant and our building is not more than 100 m. This is a grave violation of environment norms. Around 80% of our flats are booked. People who are going to stay hope that the project will either be shifted or get properly enclosed. During last year’s monsoon, the leachate (liquid toxic waste that seeps through wet garbage) from the garbage was all over the area after the compound wall of the plant collapsed.”
Multi-national companies are shunning Ramtekdi industrial zone because of the stink and unhealthy surroundings while existing industries are thinking of relocating, Jatar said.
Vikas Jagtap, vice-chairman of Ramtekdi Industrial Association, which has 105 companies as members said, “We have lost one multi-national project due to the garbage processing plant as foreign investors withdrew after visiting the site. We have filed a case in Bombay high court as the garbage processing plants located here stock and openly dump garbage in the open which causes a stink affecting those living and working nearby. Very little garbage is processed.”
Besides, he said, the civic body allowed Rochem to start construction without obtaining consent from the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board under section 21 of the Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1981 and section 25 of the Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act), 1974 to erect, construct, test and commission the plant. “This is again a major illegality,” Jatar said.”Hence, the project is deemed to be illegal because it is without ‘consent to establish, operate, commission…’ under the two acts,” Jatar added.
BBC: Dumfries energy-from-waste Scotgen plant licence revoked
The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) is revoking the operating licence of an energy-from-waste plant on the outskirts of Dumfries.
The notice was issued to Scotgen (Dumfries) Ltd on Friday and comes into effect on 23 September.
The £20m plant was the site of a major blaze last month tackled by more than 30 firefighters.
Sepa is also seeking action to avoid pollution and return the site to a “satisfactory state”.
The agency cited four reasons for the revocation notice:
- Persistent non-compliance with the requirements of its permit
- Failure to comply with an enforcement notice
- Failure to maintain financial provision and resources to comply with the requirements of the permit
- Failure to recover energy with a high level of efficiency.
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“The facility started operations more than four years ago, and in that time has never achieved a level of compliance which would give Sepa any degree of confidence that future operation would be any different.
“The facility has consistently failed to meet any reasonable expectation of environmental performance and the predicted level of energy recovery at approximately 3% is particularly disappointing and unsatisfactory.”
He said Sepa had taken this “serious and unusual action of revoking the permit” after “careful consideration and assessment of the regulatory options available”.
Incineration Versus Recycling:
In Europe, A Debate Over Trash
by Nate Steltenrich
For communities short on landfill space, “waste-to-energy” incineration sounds like a bulletproof solution: Recycle all you can, and turn the rest into heat or electricity. That’s how it’s been regarded in much of Europe, where nearly a quarter of all municipal solid waste is burned in 450 incinerators, and increasingly in the United States, where dozens of cities and towns are considering new, cutting-edge plants.
But leaders of the international zero-waste movement, which seeks to reuse all products and send nothing to landfills or incinerators, say incineration falls short on the energy front and actually encourages waste. Many “zero wasters” — including groups such as Zero Waste Europe and the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, or GAIA — have become ardent opponents of the technology, contending that proponents have co-opted the carefully crafted zero-waste label by suggesting that burning to produce energy isn’t actually wasting. In Europe, where incineration capacity continues to grow despite already exceeding the trash supply in some countries, the showdown goes beyond semantics to the heart of the meaning of sustainability.
While the world certainly has no shortage of it, trash is not renewable — not in the way that sunlight, wind, and geothermal heat are. Producing goods from virgin, finite resources requires energy — lots of it. Once the goods become trash, zero-waste advocates say, burning them in an incinerator destroys those resources for good.
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Zero-wasters say that a major problem with incineration is the long-term contracts that waste-to-energy plants sign with the cities that supply them with trash. Incinerators are extremely expensive to build — large, modern facilities in Europe cost $150 million to $230 million — and to make a profit and repay investors, incinerator operators need a guaranteed stream of waste. The operators sign contracts with municipalities to provide a certain volume of waste over a long period of time, often 20 or 30 years, effectively committing municipalities to generating a certain amount of waste. Zero-waste advocates say this reduces the incentive to recycle more and waste less, which exists with landfills, where tipping fees can be high.
With incineration, said Dominic Hogg, chairman of UK-based waste-management consulting firm Eunomia, “the financial logic for engaging in further recycling is lost.”
Hege Rooth Olbergsveen, a senior adviser in Norway’s Waste Recovery and Hazardous Waste department and a proponent of waste-to-energy, acknowledges that the economics of incineration can impair recycling efforts.
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In Flanders, Belgium, an effort to keep a lid on incinerator contracts has led nearer to zero waste, said Joan Marc Simon, executive director of Zero Waste Europe and European regional coordinator for GAIA. Since the early 1990s, when recycling rates were relatively low, the local waste authority in Flanders has decided not to increase incineration beyond roughly 25 percent, Simon said. As a result, combined recycling and composting rates now exceed 75 percent, GAIA says. “They stabilized and even reduced waste generation when they capped incineration,” Simon said.
Without incineration, he believes, most European countries could improve current recycling rates of 20 or 30 percent to 80 percent within six months. Hogg agreed, saying that rates of 70 percent should be “easy” to attain. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which calculates recycling and composting together, puts the current U.S. rate at 35 percent, compared to a combined European Union figure of 40 percent.
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Malcolm Williams, a director of the UK Zero Waste Alliance, is concerned that increased incineration capacity may lead Europe to miss what he deems are already modest waste-reduction targets for 2020. Even 90 percent recycling should be attainable, he contends. “It’s just a myth that recycling is a difficult thing to do,” said Williams. “So why on earth is anybody planning anything that is going to burn or bury more than 10 percent of the waste we’re producing?”
- See also GAIA Zero Waste World blog: Oneida Nation & Green Bay Ban The Burning Of Waste
