Today's Paper OPINION

July 18, 2013

Turning garbage into gas

While incineration endangers lives, gasification will produce transport fuel that can meet
half ofIndias consumption needs

Delhis Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit has been at her wits end on how to dispose of the citys
ever growing mountain of garbage. Rising population and growing affluence have raised the
daily outpouring of refuse to more than 8,000 tonnes, while simultaneously pushing up the cost
of land to astronomical levels. The result: Delhi has run out of land for landfills, and none of the
neighbouring States intends to surrender any to meet its needs.
The obvious answer to Delhis problem seems to be to burn the solid waste. Cities all over the
world are doing it, so why cant Delhi follow suit? In 2006, the Delhi Municipal Corporation
proposed that a small, mothballed, waste incineration plant at Timarpur, that had been put to
work for altogether five days since it was built in the 1980s, be reopened to convert 214,000
tonnes of solid waste a year into 69,000 tonnes by sifting out inorganic matter, and drying and
palletising the rest to increase its fuel value. Burning this garbage, it was estimated, would
produce six megawatts of power per hour, or 5.5 billion units of electricity a year.
The proposal never took off, but it became the springboard for a private sector grab at Delhis
garbage investors figured their income would come from the highly inflated tariff decreed by
the Central government for green energy and the carbon credits they would earn by reducing
greenhouse gas emissions.
Their plans are close to maturing. In her 2013-14 budget speech, Ms Dikshit announced that the
city already has one incineration plant at Okhla, burning almost 2,000 tonnes a day, and that two
more are being set up to incinerate another 4,300 tonnes a day. Whats more, these plants will
generate 50 MW of power every hour of the day. More incineration plants are on their way: since
the Okhla plant went on stream, the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests has approved
eight more plants in various cities.

There is, however, a catch. Incinerating garbage in Delhi will cost an estimated 200,000
ragpickers their jobs. Throughout the world, moreover, countries are closing incineration plants
owing to the hazard they pose to human health. The threats come from particulate emissions that
greatly exacerbate lung diseases from bronchitis and asthma to emphysema and lung cancer, and
from dioxins and furans in addition to the usual nitrogen and sulphur oxide gases in the flue gas.
The dioxin threat
To residents of Indian cities who have become inured to dust, smoke, diesel fumes, as well as
lead and nitrous oxide poisoning, this may sound like just one more addition to the long list of
risks they face in their daily lives. But dioxins belong to another level of threat altogether. The
word is a generic term for more than a hundred long lasting chemicals that are produced by
burning municipal and medical waste and by a few industrial processes. Dioxins are insoluble in
water and when they settle on land and water bodies, they are absorbed in their entirety by
terrestrial and aquatic vegetation. They travel up the food chain into animals and fish that feed on
plants and thence into humans. Since living organisms cannot metabolise them, they are found in
very high concentrations in meat, fish, milk and eggs. In human beings, a prolonged exposure to
dioxins through a rich diet impairs the functioning of the liver and the immune and
reproductive systems, and raises the incidence of cancer. In sum, dioxins shorten our lifespan.
Men have no way of expelling them. Women can, but only by passing them to foetuses in their
wombs or breast-feeding their babies.
Not surprisingly, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which put together the first
comprehensive report on dioxins in 1994, described them as the most poisonous substances
known to man. In Finland, the government has ordered shut an incineration plant built with the
most elaborate safeguards when it found, after two years of its operation, that dioxin levels in the
surrounding vegetation had risen by 15 to 25 per cent within a distance of 4 km from the plant.
Whenever environmentalists have pointed these hazards out to the Delhi government, its officials
and company representatives have assured them that elaborate safeguards have been
incorporated into the design of the plants to ensure that they meet prescribed safety norms. But
subsequent tests have falsified this claim. In tests carried out at Okhla last year, particulate
emissions exceeded norms on four occasions and stayed within them only on six. A test carried
out in May 2013 revealed dioxins and furans emissions from its two chimney stacks to be 2.8
and 12.7 times the prescribed maximum!
In the face of such facts, the Delhi government has merely reaffirmed its determination to go
ahead with setting up the incineration plants. This has led to the usual accusations of corruption
and crony capitalism, but in this case the cause probably lies in two preconceptions that are
deeply imbedded in the public mindset. First, that garbage is simply a nuisance and has no
economic value whatever; second, since the physical sorting of household refuse is not feasible
in India, incineration is the only way out.
Both assumptions reflect the casual ignorance of decision-makers. There is a third way of
disposing garbage that not only eliminates all pollutants, but turns garbage into gold. This is to
gasify garbage. Gasification is an incomplete combustion of organic matter that replaces a large

part of the carbon dioxide we get from combustion with carbon monoxide and hydrogen. These
two gases are, and have been for a hundred years, the basic building blocks of the worlds
petrochemicals industry. They are also ideal for driving gas turbines to generate power. From
Indias perspective, their best feature is the ease with which they can be synthesised into any
transport fuel one desires, and into Di Methyl Ether, a condensate gas that is a superior diesel
substitute and a complete substitute for Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG).
Gasification also eliminates the threat from dioxins. When gasification is carried out with
oxygen, it produces only seven per cent of the flue gas obtained from combustion. The reaction
takes place, moreover, at such high temperatures 1000 to 3,000 degrees Celsius that dioxins
and furans get broken down into their basic elements, losing their toxicity. The release of dioxins
from a 24 tonne-per-day plasma gasification plant that has been running for more than a decade
in Yoshii, Japan, has been found to be less than one per cent of that released by corresponding
incineration plants. Consequently, city and municipal corporations around the world have begun
to switch to gasification. According to the U.S.-based Recovered Energy Inc., a turnkey
engineering company specialising in renewable energy projects, there are 200 Municipal Solid
Waste (MSW) gasification plants under construction or in operation globally, of which half use
the revolutionary new technology called plasma gasification.
Isolated ventures
Ironically, India already has employed plasma gasification technology for the past four years,
two 68 tonnes-a-day commercial plants employing this technology have been disposing of
medical and other hazardous wastes in Pune and Nagpur. Since Indian states do not share
information, however, these have remained isolated ventures.
At present, most MSW gasification plants abroad produce electricity. But this is giving way to
the production of transport fuels. British Airways is partnering Solena, a U.S.-based biofuels
company, to set up a plant that will gasify 1,300 tonnes a day of Londons solid waste to produce
16 million gallons of Aviation Turbine Fuel and 9 million gallons of naphtha in addition to
generating up to 40 MW of power. This plant is expected to meet two per cent of British
Airways global demand for jet fuel. Solena has won contracts for similar plants with Qantas,
Lufthansa and SAS. Lufthansas plant will have a modification that New Delhi will do well to
take note of: instead of naphtha, it intends to produce 9 million tonnes of diesel fuel.
India stands therefore at a crossroads. In 10 years from now, 600 million Indians will be living in
cities with more than a million inhabitants who generate at least 600,000 tonnes of garbage a
day. Incinerating this garbage will endanger the lives of future generations. Alternatively, this is
sufficient to produce more than 35 million tonnes of transport fuel a year and meet half of Indias
current consumption of the same. The saving in foreign exchange will lift the threat of a foreign
exchange crisis forever. It will also free domestic prices from the yoke of international oil prices
forever. And it will do all this without requiring a rupee of subsidies.