Discussion on Solutions to Waste Management in India and Elsewhere

Participants (In the order of appearance. As of 12/05/2012, 2 PM EST):

            , and Nuggehalli Vasuki (CEO (retired), DSWA).

Link to the original thread on WTERT's partner D-Waste's LinkedIn group.

The report "Observations from India's Crisis" will be published soon as a PDF, DOC on wtert.org and also as a BLOG POST in this Blog

Direction: The discussion is quickly moving in the direction of discussing the best technologies for waste management in India.

Context: It started in a thread requesting help regarding a report on India's waste management crisis - by Mr. Annepu.

Initiation: The discussion was initiated by Dr. Themelis's support to the original query as a reply to a comment made by Dr. Mahwar.

Featured: Professor Nickolas Themelis's Comment On Waste Reduction:

There is no question that SOME of the waste generated in U.S. and Canada could be reduced. Both countries generate over 50% more tons per capita than Japan and other more advance nations in northern Europe. 

But these nations still incinerate about 0.3 tons per capita, rather than landfill it.

Analogy Worth a Special Mention: 

The situation with waste management is somewhat like that with public health: Good diet and exercise, vitamins, preventive medicine, all contribute to better health and less sickness. Despite all that, there will be some sick people who need to go to hospitals. It is obvious that advocating against hospitals or opposing new ones will not improve public health. 

It is the same situation with urban waste management: There all kinds of means for reduction, recycling, composting but ALL human experience has shown that at the end there remains a substantial fraction that has to go to either "incinerators with energy recovery or to sanitary landfills. Environmental organizations who oppose these two means on principle, in effect are perpetuating traditional landfilling. Regrettably, the Sierra Club is spending a lot of donated money doing just that.

Other Comments

On the use of word "Crisis" for the waste management situation in India

Dr. Mahwar's comment:

What do you mean by crises in waste management? Are there any crises of waste management in India or any where in the world in your knowledge?

Prof. Themelis's response (edited):

The use of word "crisis" is apt. For example, refer to the detailed report for just one place, Bangalore, in the New York Times. (India's Plague, Trash, Drowns Its Garden City During Strike)

Asit Nema's response (edited):

I could not agree more with you on the term 'Crisis'! Indeed we have a full blown crisis here (example Bangalore, Thiruvananthapuram-Vilappilsala and many other cities) as over the last 12 - 15 years, all interventions attempted across the country have been driven by the desire to convert 'waste-to-wealth' and 'waste-to-energy' but ironically they have resulted in 'waste-of-wealth' and 'waste-of-energy'! 

Renee Gratton's comment:

I am not entirely surprised at the state of waste management in India, (however) your report had me gasping at the effects this brings. (report will be published soon on wtert.org and this blog)

Media question about New York City's Waste-to-Energy RFP

Prof. Themelis, I'm a reporter at City & State, a New York politics and government newspaper.

I'm writing a short item about New York City's waste-to-energy Request for Proposal (RFP). Marco Castaldi, a professor at Columbia University and an expert on waste-to-energy technologies, told me that the city is moving in the right direction with this, but that older combustion technology should be considered along with newer technologies, such as gasification. I'm told the two main types of waste-to-energy technologies are combustion, which has been used for about 30 years, and gasification, which has emerged over the past five years or so.

He said that he's not for one type of technology or the other, but that as an engineer, it's best to have both options on the table to find the best possible solution for the city. For example, the newer gasification technologies are more versatile, since the gas created can be used in more ways, but it also is more expensive.

Do you agree with this? Is there a risk the city could end up promoting gasification when combustion might be a better option for the city as it tries to divert more waste from landfills?

Response of Prof. Themelis:
I agree with Prof. Castaldi and this is what we recommend to cities and towns who wnat to move away from landfilling: When they issue Requests For Proposals for thermal treatment (WTE) of MSW, they should not close the door to either established or new technologies. ALL technologies, older and newer, must meet very stringent emission standards so the decision of the municipality must be based on economics (lower gate fee to be paid by city per ton of MSW treated). Broadly, these economics depend on three factors: Plant availability (number of 24-hr days per year); energy production per ton of MSW; and capital investment per annual ton of capacity. On this basis, let the most economic process win. Regrettably in less informed/advanced cities, this issue has been so politicized that some RFPs specifically exclude the existing technologies, as was the case in the recent RFP of Mayor Bloomberg, The hope is that newer WTE technologies, such as gasification, will be more acceptable to people who for over twenty years have opposed any form of WTE for NYC; the result is that the City today landfills more wastes than in 2001. The scientific fact is that gasification is partial combustion, to produce syngas, followed by full combustion of the syngas to produce energy. All thermal treatment processes, old, new and future ones, require full combustion. People who prefer landfilling in other states to WTE in their own state are opposed to any type of WTE, as it happened to the Staten Island part of the NYC RFP last week.

Scientific American on "Does it make sense to get energy from garbage?

A reporter from New York Public Radio brought to my attention today (April 14, 2012) the above article in Scientific American. I found it to be factual until I came to the following statement by Laura Haight of NYPIRG:

"Laura Haight, senior environmental associate at New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG), says that if the petition passes, waste will take incentives away from more sustainable technologies like wind and solar. She also says that presenting the issue as though incineration offsets landfill emissions is the wrong approach."

I don't know in what other environmental areas NYPIRG is involved but when it comes to waste management in New York State, I think it is doing a great disservice to New York and the City by constantly maintaining that the alternative to WTE is not landfilling but recycling. They have been propagating this myth for years and regrettably are successful, thereby perpetuating sending hundreds of thousands of garbage trucks annually over GWB to distant states for landfilling. In fact, the tons recycled in NYC have not changed much since 2002, when Mayor Bloomberg read our Life After Fresh Kills report. Also, recycling tonnage did not change much between 2008 and 2010, according to data provided on the web by the Department of Sanitation of NYC. NYPIRG obviously do not want to be confused by the facts.

If one goes to www.wtert.org Theses, they will see a list of Theses sponsored by the Earth Engineering Center (EEC) in recent years that has included all means of sustainable waste management. Each thesis represents over one year of intense study by highly qualified young engineers (we have room for only one out of about ten applicants) who have come to Columbia's Earth and Environmental Engineering program because they want to contribute, in their career, to sustainable development. They report the facts.