The Hindu 29.04.2013
Civic body to construct waste-to-energy plant
Coimbatore Corporation Council passes resolution.
The latest in the series of measures the Coimbatore
Corporation has taken to address issues related to waste management is a
waste-to-energy plant.
The Corporation, by way of a
Council resolution, has an in-principle approval to establish a plant at
its old dump yard in Kavundampalayam.
The Council
resolution, passed at the April 25 meeting, said that on a trial basis
the Corporation would establish the plant in Kavundampalayam, where the
Corporation had proposed to shift the MGR Wholesale Vegetable Market.
The
decision to establish the plant followed a direction from the
Commissioner for Municipal Administration, who citing the initiatives
taken at Arcot Municipality, had said that municipalities and municipal
corporation could go in for plants with capacity to process three metric
tonne, five metric tonne or 10 metric tonne capacity waste.
The local bodies could use the power generated to power its street lights and thereby save on electricity charges.
The
Commissioner had also said that in Arcot, the local body collected
waste from vegetable markets, restaurants, lodges, hospitals, abattoirs,
fish, meat and poultry shops and other places and used the same in
bio-gas plants, where using the bio-methanation process, 280 units of
power were generated.
The resolution said that the
Corporation could use a similar approach to gather degradable, wet waste
from markets, restaurants, wedding halls, and other places to generate
power.
It could do so at the T.K. Market, Anna Market or MGR Market. The plant size could vary depending on the waste gathered.
Sources
in the Corporation said that the reason behind choosing Kavundampalayam
was keeping in mind the proposal to shift the wholesale market to the
old dump yard there. If the bio-gas plant were to be successful, the
Corporation could establish similar plants depending on the location.
This
would be a decentralised approach and the power generated from such
plants could be used at the local level. A rough estimate suggests that
the 30 per cent of 800 tonnes or 240 tonnes is the vegetable/ wet/
degradable waste the Corporation collected a day. By doing so, the
sources pointed out that the Corporation could also improve its waste
management as only dry degradable/ non-degradable would reach the
transit stations and then Vellalore, where the contractor in charge of
executing the solid waste management programme would find it easy to
process the waste.
The sources said that a 10 tonne bio-gas plant could cost around Rs. 1.50 crore.
