A new waste-to-energy incinerator being constructed near a landfill in Ghazipur is a source of worry for ragpickers.
THE entrance to Ghazipur kabadi basti is littered with segregated waste such as empty water bottles, polythene covers and used packing materials. A young boy is sitting alone and separating recyclable items from an assortment of small things placed in front of him. So absorbed is he in his work that the act of taking pictures by an outsider does not disturb him. Inside the slum, adults seated together are busy separating and grouping recyclable and saleable things from the waste which they procured from the nearby landfill.
They all know that the landfill which has been the source of their livelihood all these years will not remain so in a year. Right now, access to it is illegally granted to those waste-pickers who pay Rs.20 to guards. The rules do not allow waste-pickers access to the landfill, where unsegregated waste transported by trucks is dumped, because it contains, apart from recyclable materials, hazardous waste to which a visitor may be exposed. Local residents say that recently the police picked up about 17 waste-pickers collecting waste from there. Those who guard the landfill alert the waste-pickers before the police arrive, but not always.
Despite the risk involved, the waste-pickers do not give up because the alternative is a hunt for saleable waste by endlessly roaming the residential colonies, facing ill-treatment at the hands of the police and society, and ending up collecting far less than what the landfills would give. The commissioning of a new waste-to-energy (WTE) incinerator that is being constructed near the landfill will close down the landfill. An NGO, Chintan, working among these families, has told Das that waste-pickers like him will be absorbed in the new incineration plant as workers. But residents of the basti realise that the new plant may at best provide employment to just 50 persons.
The Ghazipur WTE plant is one of the three projects undertaken by the Delhi government through public private partnerships; the other two are Timarpur-Okhla and Narela Bawana. The Timarpur-Okhla project became operational in January this year, while Narela Bawana is at a formative stage. A similar WTE plant set up at Timarpur in 1987 by the Union Ministry of New and Renewable Energy was abandoned after it failed to generate electricity owing to the lack of waste with a high calorific value.
The quality of waste produced by Indian consumers has remained the same over the years, yet WTE projects have secured official backing because they earn carbon credits from the Clean Development Mechanism of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The production of electricity itself has received less emphasis, as shown by the Timarpur-Okhla projects failure to generate electricity so far.
The projects appear to be important to make the waste disappear, free the land from the landfills, and achieve the unstated objective of removing waste-pickers from the urban landscape. Indeed, the WTE projects, like the waste-pickers, also target recyclable materials and would prefer them to be segregated from other waste, but they have no means of doing so and this contributes to their inefficiency.
According to a study by the activist Dharmesh Shah, Delhis waste supports a population of approximately 100,000 waste-pickers, who recover nearly 1,600 tonnes, or approximately 15-20 per cent, of the waste comprising usable materials such as metal, paper, cardboard and plastic. These materials are manually or semi-mechanically processed and sold back to industry as raw material for new products. This, according to him, results in huge savings for the city municipality. He also estimates that the waste-pickers in Delhi collectively prevent the emission of 962,133 tonnes of greenhouse gases annually, about 3.6 times more than that saved by any WTE project accruing carbon credits in India.
COMMents
COMMents
SHARE