prasad1
Active member
Most Indian cities are surrounded by hills of garbage, which are a testimony to our neglect over a long period of managing and disposing of the waste we generate in the course of our household activities and commercial activities in the cities. The waste has been dumped for decades, dry and wet, plastic, textiles, and what have you, without sorting, on the outskirts of the cities. Even after the Municipal Solid Waste (Management and Handling) Rules, 2000 specified that landfill sites should be allocated on which sanitary landfills should be developed to receive the final residual waste, the sites have been used only as open dumpsites for all kinds of waste, mixed together.
The good news is that we have a simple, low-cost solution of bioremediation to remove the garbage hills and their lingering ill effects, which permanently achieves near-zero emission of harmful gases (such as methane, hydrogen sulphide, and ammonia) and leachate. A number of attempts at bioremediation and bio-mining were made from as early as 1998 in Nasik, Madurai and Mumbai, and there have been more since then. Most recently, Raaginii Jaain, a national expert on the Government of India’s Swachh Bharat Mission, has developed a rapid bioremediation process for old dumps (wrongly called landfills), and has successfully used it on old waste — six lakh tonnes at the Bhandewadi dump at Nagpur, 20 lakh tonnes at the Bandhwari dump shared by Gurugram (Gurgaon) and Faridabad, 10 lakh tonnes at Durg in Chhattisgarh, and three lakh tonnes in Gandhidham in Gujarat, among others.
There are other entrepreneurs and innovators who are also trying bioremediation of old waste. What these examples show is the superiority and simplicity of bioremediation in that it is low-cost and environment-friendly. The most valuable part of this exercise is that the land which was hosting waste dumps is now fully recovered for alternate uses. Since it is very hard to win local acceptance for new waste processing sites, the recovered land can be used for waste management.
There is also a lesson here for decision makers at all levels in government. Equipment suppliers are usually keen to push the technology they are providing and they often have lobbying capacity to predispose the policy in favour of a particular technology. It is very important that alternative technologies, including the simpler and cost-effective ones, are carefully evaluated on their merit.
http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/a-city-laid-waste-waste-management-environment-4725115/
The good news is that we have a simple, low-cost solution of bioremediation to remove the garbage hills and their lingering ill effects, which permanently achieves near-zero emission of harmful gases (such as methane, hydrogen sulphide, and ammonia) and leachate. A number of attempts at bioremediation and bio-mining were made from as early as 1998 in Nasik, Madurai and Mumbai, and there have been more since then. Most recently, Raaginii Jaain, a national expert on the Government of India’s Swachh Bharat Mission, has developed a rapid bioremediation process for old dumps (wrongly called landfills), and has successfully used it on old waste — six lakh tonnes at the Bhandewadi dump at Nagpur, 20 lakh tonnes at the Bandhwari dump shared by Gurugram (Gurgaon) and Faridabad, 10 lakh tonnes at Durg in Chhattisgarh, and three lakh tonnes in Gandhidham in Gujarat, among others.
There are other entrepreneurs and innovators who are also trying bioremediation of old waste. What these examples show is the superiority and simplicity of bioremediation in that it is low-cost and environment-friendly. The most valuable part of this exercise is that the land which was hosting waste dumps is now fully recovered for alternate uses. Since it is very hard to win local acceptance for new waste processing sites, the recovered land can be used for waste management.
There is also a lesson here for decision makers at all levels in government. Equipment suppliers are usually keen to push the technology they are providing and they often have lobbying capacity to predispose the policy in favour of a particular technology. It is very important that alternative technologies, including the simpler and cost-effective ones, are carefully evaluated on their merit.
http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/a-city-laid-waste-waste-management-environment-4725115/
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