WEALTH FROM WASTE

The subject of solid waste management was never more relevant than it is now. In fact Delhi alone produces around 8,000 tonne garbage per day, while the estimate for the country is 27.4 million tonne per year.

Waste management is still a linear system of collection and disposal, creating health and environmental hazards. In the light of this, Alliance for Waste Management, a common platform formed by organisations working on solid waste management issues, has been promoting the concept of ‘Integrated Zero Waste Management’.

“While waste-to-energy technology is posing a serious threat to environment, the government is paying lip service to the concept of ‘Integrated Zero Waste Management’ approach,” says Gopal Krishna of Toxic Links, a non-governmental organisation. Gopal adds that the Planning Commission’s Tenth Plan document states that India has bio-mass deficit, which essentially means the soil lacks carbon content. “So why burn the waste and release carbon in the air, instead of adding it to the soil?” asks Krishna.

“In India, the municipalities are still using the conventional method of either burning or burying to dispose off garbage,” elaborates Krishna, adding that the zero waste approach is being promoted and followed the world over. “Again the landfills are neither well managed nor lined properly to protect against contamination of soil and groundwater,” he points out.

Adds M B Nirmal, the founder of Exnora International, which is in the business of waste management, “Waste is wealth, why waste ‘waste’. India has a large number of urban poor and a lot of employment can be created through waste management process of composting organic waste and recycling inorganic waste.”

According to Nirmal, “Around 75% of the garbage in India is organic in nature. Since 75% of people are employed in the farm sector, it could be converted into organic manure beneficial to both farmers and to promote organic farming in the country.”

Exnora has tied up with Technomedia Solutions Pvt Ltd to come up with a Delhi plan to deal with solid waste management. “Our Delhi plan will be to start working with resident welfare associations (RWAs). We will first conduct workshops with these residential colonies or societies and then these RWAs will come up with their own action plans. We will give our expertise and guidance to them to manage their own waste,” says Nirmal. “We believe that the efforts to improve existing conditions can only be successful through local participation and capacity building of...

A PROGRAMME FOR ZERO WASTE

1. The economic playing field must be rebalanced. The hierarchy of profitability must match the environmental hierarchy. This can be done by revising waste taxes and public benefits in three ways:

introducing a disposal tax that reflects the environmental hierarchy cutting the subsidies presently given to incineration introducing a price guarantee scheme for recycled materials to fund the build-up

costs of four stream recycling.2. The £550 million raised in waste taxes must be re-channelled to a Zero Waste Fund.

This requires: a change in the landfill tax regulations so that the 20 per cent offsets are paid into

the publicly-run recycling fund earmarking a further 20 per cent to support employment and environmental goals

through recycling amending the packaging recovery regulations so that payments by the 'obligated

parties' are channelled to recycling collectors.3. Establishing a Zero Waste Agency to administer the transitional funds and 'animate' the

change.4. Founding a new type of Green Academy, equivalent to the German technical schools of

the mid-nineteenth century. It would be charged with developing organisational forms, knowledge and skills relevant to zero waste, and new ways of generating 'distributed intelligence'. Its curricula and priorities would be set by the needs thrown up by the new environmental systems. Hence its research, teaching and skill formation would be linked closely to ground level projects - following the approach of the Ulm School of Design - and provide learning resources to those in or outside employment.

5. Appointing Zero Waste Advisers - some recruited from leading recycling and reduction projects overseas - to advise on recycling schemes and projects. The group would be part of an international network, promoting exchanges and part-time attachments, and linking into practitioners' associations.

6. The launch of a 'Closed Loop Industrialisation' Initiative, promoting the development of secondary materials industries, ecodesign and hazard reduction technologies. In addition to material productivity, it would aim to promote 'de-scaling' technologies suitable for local and regional economies. It would be organised in conjunction with regional development agencies.

7. The extension of producer responsibility into new fields, not only electrical and electronics appliances, end-of-life vehicles and tyres, but other durable equipment, newspapers, and hazardous products and materials. The weight of responsibility should be placed at the point of product and process design, since they have the greatest capacity to develop alternatives. In each case, the finance contributed by producers should be re-channelled to develop the alternatives.

8. Devolving responsibility for waste disposal to districts, through direct payments for the costs of disposal (rather than property-based precepts) and giving districts responsibility for identifying and negotiating disposal options within their own boundaries or with neighbouring districts. This would represent the proximity principle with teeth.

9. Restoring public confidence in wade management and democratising risk through: planning reform to give financial support and access to information to civil groups and neighbourhoods affected by waste proposals; a new culture of openness in regulatory bodies; an independent waste hazards control advisory body; and an environmental freedom of information provision.

10. A govemment-led commitment to the zero waste target 'within a generation', reflected in the above measures and the adoption of tighter targets to 'reduce with the aim of eliminating' mixed waste disposal by 2010. This would include a phased ban on organic waste in landfills and on landfilling or incinerating hazard-producing materials, and a moratorium of new mixed waste incinerators for five years.

HOW TO CREATE WEALTH FROM WASTE

WHEN MOHAMMED Arif Noorzai, Afghanistan’s minister for light industries, came calling a while ago, he made a rather unusual request. He insisted on visiting Panipat in Haryana.

Why Panipat? Not because it’s the site of ancient battles, but because it has an unusual industry: scores of the city’s inhabitants make a living spinning blankets from woollen rags. Known as shoddies, these coarse, low-cost blankets are made on looms set up in backyards, and everyday consume over four containers of cut rags imported from the US and Canada.

Both raw material and finished product are cheap, and it generates employment. It is this vibrant community industry that Noorzai wanted to take back to his war-ravaged country.

Scavenging angels. And it’s not blankets alone. The town boasts of a huge subsidiary market that runs on discards. "Zippers, buttons and cloth lining are salvaged from the tonnes of woollen garments everyday," says Puneet Agarwal, S.K. (India) Marketing, in the business for 15 years.

Agarwal and his ilk are only now being recognised for their gutsy entrepreneurship. Over the years, they have battled reluctant bankers, poor product acceptance and the lack of coherent policies.

Waste management, in fact, did not start off as a business opportunity. Environment-conscious people across the country took the initiative to clean up their world and, in the process, more often than not, found that their initiatives could help someone somewhere make money as well (See sideshow: Citizen clean).

Now, we have waste entrepreneurs all over the country–people who have tinkered with technology and come up with the best way to not just dispose of garbage but to convert it into solid, money-making proposals. Which should not really be such a surprise. After all, Indians are no strangers to recycling and its merits. Every little thing is salvaged and reused in several incarnations over several generations. Add a profit angle to this, and there you have your waste entrepreneur. As N.B. Mazumdar, chief of waste management at Hudco, says: "Conservation and thrift are integral to our attitude."

Initiatives in this field are wide-ranging. On one end of the spectrum, you have housewives like Delhi-based Asha Pandey who converts milk bags, thread and paper to teaching aids and rugs. On the other end are giant waste-to-energy (WtE) units like the Rs 78 crore power unit in western Maharashtra driven by bagasse from sugar mills. Ranging from the usual suspects like plastic, metal, glass or paper, right down to human hair, dog fur, animal and human excreta–there seems to be little that cannot be reconverted and sold.

Gold from dross. Much of the action can be attributed to judicial activism and the subsequent stipulations of the Municipal Solid Wastes (management and handling) Rules, 2000 and Biomedical Wastes (management and handling) Rules, 1998. This makes it mandatory for municipal bodies to set up waste-processing/disposal units before December 2003.

The municipal dumping grounds are virtual gold mines, as cash-strapped municipal bodies invite private enterprise to help them get rid of garbage and take the profits. Says Mazumdar: "This area holds tremendous potential, not only for small business but also for large corporates."

In the US, the solid waste industry generates $43 billion in annual revenue and contributes $14 billion as direct and indirect taxes. Over 27,000 companies, employing 3,67,800 people, are engaged in this business, which accounts for 0.5 per cent of the GDP.

The potential here is tremendous: India generates around 48 million tonnes of municipal solid waste (MSW), with an organic, biodegradable content of over 40 per cent, ideal for composting. Municipal bodies spend between Rs 500 and Rs 1,500 per tonne on collection, transportation, treatment and disposal; only 5 per cent of this is spent on final disposal.

Private players are now being enticed to take on the task. The announcement in Budget 2002 of a Rs 500 crore Urban Reform Incentive Fund and a City Challenge Fund, which seeks to rope in the private sector in the provision of civic services, may trigger activity here. The Mumbai-based Excel Industries has set up aerobic (microbial treatment) composting plants in 12 cities. The municipal bodies supply free MSW, the entrepreneur

runs the plants, and Excel provides the know-how. "Over 500 tonnes of MSW are turned into 200 tonnes of compost in a 45-day cycle," says Excel’s Ramesh Gade.

In 20 Class 1 towns of Rajasthan, including Jaipur and Jodhpur, the state has offered 30-year land leases for MSW projects at a mere Re 1/sq.m/year. Hyderabad and Pune have given private parties the task of collecting and disposing hazardous waste from hospitals and small clinics.

Money from MSW, hospital waste, ash... the possibilities are endless. Intelligent Investor looks at six areas where entrepreneurs have made money from muck.

WEALTH FROM WASTE: Building bricks from oil field effluent treatment plant sludge

Waste water produced in petroleum production contains hydrocarbons and many trace metals such as Cr, Cd, As, Hg. It is treated in effluent treatment plant (ETP) before discharging into the environment.

In the process, a voluminous sludge containing oil / hydrocarbon is generated, disposal of which is a problem.

The sludge contains oil, water and inorganic materials. In an attempt to utilize all these components, investigations on partial replacement of the raw materials used in making masonry bricks by the sludge were carried out. Bricks prepared by replacing about 30% of the raw materials (clay, sand and water) by the sludge were found to conform to Indian standard specification for common burnt clay building bricks. In the process, the water in the sludge serve as the process water, the hydrocarbons burn and provide about 5% of the fuel requirement for brick making and the inorganic materials are fixed as constituents of the bricks. Standard size bricks prepared using the sludge and firing in a commercial coal

fired kiln show high compressive strength (163 kgf/cm2) and low water absorption capacity (10.4%).

The sludge was mixed with soil and then pelletized in a disk type pelletizer. The pellets were dried and then fired in a laboratory scale electrical furnace. The bulk density, crushing strength and water absorption capacities of the pellets were determined. The pellets can be used as light weight aggregates.

The process for making common masonry brick, lightweight aggregate and blended cement utilizing the sludge were compared. Considering the local condition of industrialization, the process for making common masonry bricks using the sludge seems to be the most promising one for eliminating the problem associated with disposal of the sludge.