Babu Alappat, professor, Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, on Monday advocated the need for moving towards incinerating municipal solid waste because of lesser availability of land for landfills as well as considerable time taken for the waste to get converted into compost.
He was delivering a talk on ‘Waste to energy: in the Indian scenario’, organised by the Institution of Engineers and the Institution of Valuers, Mangaluru branches, here. Mr. Alappat said attempts to incinerate waste in the 1980’s were shelved for reasons such as economic non-viability and administrations resorted to dump garbage in landfills and produce compost.
However, landfills had their own disadvantage. Thousands of tonnes of garbage piled up in one locality not only would be hazardous to health, but also would have resulted in contamination of groundwater due to leachate.
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Mr. Alappat said the Delhi administration had been experimenting with incineration of solid waste and plants had come up near Okhla and Ghazipur. Before going for incineration, the administration has to check whether the incinerability of the solid waste was at least more than 1,000 kilo calories/ kg. if it was up to 2,400 kacl/kg, auxiliary fuel was required to burn the waste. Incinerability above 2,400 kacl/ kg did not require any external addictives to burn the waste. However, the incinerability of the present waste in India is around 1,000 kacl/ kg, Mr. Alappat said and hoped it would improve in the coming days with more combustible waste like paper, plastic etc., getting generated.
There are also concerns about environment pollution from the incinerating units. Specific standards for adhering to permissible limits are being worked out by the Union government, he said.
At the same time, public mindset about incinerating units that they cause pollution has to be addressed. While many would say, not in my backyard, there are people who do not want such units anywhere, Mr. Alappat added.
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‘Lesser availability of land for landfills’