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.