The Coimbatore Corporation Council on Monday accorded approval for the waste-to-energy project. At the urgent meeting, the Council decided to implement the project, which will use 500 metric tonnes waste a day to generate power.
The Council approving of the project comes days after Finance and Taxation Committee Chairperson R. Prabhakaran made an announcement in this regard in the Corporation Budget for 2013-14.
The resolution said that the Corporation had been implementing solid waste project since 2008 after it obtained Rs. 68.93 crore from the Central Government under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission.
It had handed over the project to the Coimbatore Integrated Solid Waste Management Company, the responsibility of which was to establish four transit stations, engage in secondary transportation of waste from the transit stations to the Vellalore yard, establish compost plant to process the waste and also a sanitary landfill. The company also had to run the facility for 20 years.
The Corporation’s task is to hand over the waste collected from the primary waste collection process to the company.
The resolution also said that the company had to segregate the waste into degradable waste, non-degradable waste and rejects to process the degradable waste into compost using the aerobic digestion process and dump the non-degradable waste and rejects into the sanitary land fill facility.
But after the passage of the agreement, the volume of the waste the Corporation collected everyday had increased by 250 metric tonnes a day after the merger of three municipalities, seven town panchayats and a village panchayat.
The company received around 850 metric tonnes waste a day which it found difficult to process, given the installed capacity, which was 500 tonnes of processed waste.
Meanwhile, the Corporation had decided to establish a waste-to-energy project as announced in the Corporation Budget 2012-13. Consequent upon the announcement, a team of officials visited waste-to-energy project facilities in the Pune and Delhi Municipal Corporations and concluded that such a facility was possible in Coimbatore as well.
The resolution said that the Corporation could establish the waste-to-energy plant at the Vellalore yard or any other convenient place in the public-private partnership mode.
After the Council passed the resolution, North Zone Chairman P. Rajkumar appealed to Mayor S.M. Velusamy to also have a facility to dispose of construction debris. Referring to his recent visit to New Delhi, he said that the Delhi Municipal Corporation had a facility to process the debris, which it, with the help of a private party, segregated into sand, bricks and other waste.
If the Corporation were to establish a similar facility, it would go a long way in saving the water tanks in the city, the survival of which were threatened because of the indiscriminate dumping of the debris.
Deputy Commissioner S. Sivarasu said that it would be easy for the Delhi Municipal Corporation to implement the project because it received a steady tonnage of debris, which was around 200. But, not the Coimbatore Corporation.
For the project to be successful, the Coimbatore Corporation too should receive a steady tonnage of debris.
The Mayor promised to consider the suggestion.
