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.