Trash Collection and Recycling Abroad

In Switzerland, trash is taken very seriously. You usually have at least 4 sorting bins under your sink for paper, plastic, aluminum, organic, and then general trash.

My Life in France

I have observed a wide range of differences when it comes to trash collection and recycling.  In Singapore we lived in an apartment and had a live-in helper, so I am really not sure where the garbage went as she took care of it.  I think there was some central room where trash bags were sorted.

In Thailand, you simply put everything out on the street in big trash cans and passers-by would sort through it.  Once a week an old Thai man would come up our soi (street) riding a bike that pulled a cart.  He’d yell some incoherent thing that sounded like “bring out your dead”.  He was collecting cardboard so that he would take it to the recycling facility nearby and make some money.  You only need 25 baht for a decent street meal in Bangkok, and I am sure he made good money as his cart…

View original post 592 more words

Advertisement

Waste management in India – addressing a national issue on a local level

Addressing waste management at a local village level is one way to kick-start the process and start connecting with emerging networks that operate recycling and garbage removal services. Although the waste management in India, as in many developing countries, lacks a holistic government run structure for removing and recycling waste, there is an incredible amount of informal recycling and entrepreneurial skills in reusing discarded materials. This enthusiasm and local attention to waste can be built upon to address the broader issue.

thedesignAlternative

As I am currently living in a small village on the outskirts of Jaipur in India, one of the major challenges I am currently addressing is waste disposal. A major issue facing India in the 21st century is waste management and improving informal and formal infrastructure to dispose and recycle garbage. In a country with 1.2 billion people and a rapidly emerging consumer market, a lack of formalised waste management system is likely to become a major strain on the natural environment and on the population.

Addressing waste management  at a local village level is one way to kick-start the process and start connecting with emerging networks that operate recycling and garbage removal services. Although the waste management in India, as in many developing countries, lacks a holistic government run structure for removing and recycling waste,  there is an incredible amount of informal recycling and entrepreneurialism in reusing discarded materials. This enthusiasm and…

View original post 435 more words

In Delhi, waste generates power — and debate

Panchabuta-Renewable Energy & Cleantech in India

According to reports, by the end of this year, Delhi will have its second waste-to-energy plant generating electricity at the landfill near Ghazipur. A similar plant, Timarpur Okhla Waste to Energy plant, sited in the vicinity of a residential colony and a hospital, has started generation since the beginning of this year.

The Delhi government is buoyant that it has finally found a solution to tackling the ever-increasing piles of waste. No government wants to grapple with millions of tonnes of waste dumped on prime land, polluting the groundwater and the air and threatening to multiply.

Delhi, with limited space, views waste-to-energy plants as a win-win solution. “Energy production is incidental. Our main concern is waste,” says Shakti Sinha, Principal Secretary, Power, summing up the government’s perception of these plants.

“The plants are absolutely safe,” he asserts. “We use state-of-the-art technology, and these are run as per the European Union norms…

View original post 547 more words

Sorghum as Biofuel Feedstock

Passing Through . . . .

Home Alternative Energy Biofuels Could Sorghum be the Perfect Biofuel?

Could Sorghum be the Perfect Biofuel?

By Brian Westenhaus | Thu, 21 June 2012 21:44 | 0

A group of researchers led by Purdue University scientists believes sweet and biomass sorghum would meet the need for next-generation biofuels to be environmentally sustainable, easily adopted by producers and take advantage of existing agricultural infrastructure.

A sorghum head of seed near to maturity.

Those attributes point to potential adaptability for sorghum.  Scientists from Purdue, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, University of Illinois and Cornell University believe sorghum, a grain crop similar to corn, could benefit from the rail system, grain elevators and corn ethanol processing facilities already in place.

Their article explaining the perspective has been published early online in the journal Biofuels, Bioproducts & Biorefining.

Click here for Oilprice.com’s Special FREE Investment Report on Sorghum

Nick Carpita, a Purdue professor…

View original post 795 more words

MSW to Energy – A Quick Glance

Energy Matters

Brief Introduction: There have been  lots of  reports from all over the world about utilization of municipal solid waste(MSW) for conversion to energy. In India too, we have been talking and discussing about segregation of household waste to enable subsequent processing activities. But it has not taken off in any significant way due to a number of reasons. In the next couple of posts I intend to summarize the approaches followed worldwide along with Technology options available. Hopefully, it will throw light on what we need to do in India to put our act together for exploiting municipal solid waste (MSW) and its conversion to energy. Globally too, although there are quite a few success stories to relate, it has been rather difficult to sustain interest.  This post is based on a recent extensive report from EPRI (Electrical Power Research Institute) on this subject. I do believe there are several…

View original post 368 more words

Agricultural Farm Management in India

Prabumj's Blog

The main objective of technology-based agriculture must be to reduce input cost while increasing the yield, particularly for small and marginal farmers. Agriculture scientists would like farmers to realise that reduction of chemical-based fertilizers and pesticides can benefit both man and earth over the long run. Farmers in particular would stand to gain as a major portion of their money is spent on buying these chemicals. The focus, they believe, must shift to educating farmers on the value of waste matter being generated in both their fields and homes, and availability of technologies to convert waste into wealth. Their farm economics will definitely improve if they realise and adopt this. It is precisely on these lines that scientists at the Myrada Krishi Vigyan Kendra at Gobichettipalayam, in Erode, Tamil Nadu have beenworking for the past several years in implementing a project called IFD (Integrated farm development model). Also called as…

View original post 557 more words

Waste to Energy for India

Melting Coal

Urban India produces 55 million tones of municipal solid waste and 38 billion litres of sewage annually. Further, large amounts of waste are produced by industries.

Waste generation in India is growing at a very fast pace and is expected to rise rapidly in the future. This has mainly been due to industrialization, increase in living standards and urbanization. This waste needs to be contained.  The most profitable and feasible option is conversion of this waste to energy. Advancement in conversion technologies has made it easier to undergo this process thereby minimizing waste and utilizing its energy potential.

Waste to Energy India Scenario

According to the ministry of new and renewable energy (MNRE) 2010-11 annual report, there exists a potential of 3600 MW from urban and industrial waste. MNRE is actively promoting the generation of energy from waste by providing incentives and subsidies. Estimates from the Indian renewable energy development…

View original post 349 more words

How Garbage Disappears Into People’s Pockets

REVOLUTIONS IN MY SPACE: A BLOG BY RITA BANERJI

One in every 5 humans that inhabits planet earth dumps his/her garbage in India.

GARBAGE = FILTH = DISEASE

Hence, one would expect an organized and efficient system of garbage collection/disposal to be a fundamental condition of nation management.  However, garbage has a whole different story in India.  And here it is in pictures.

At first glance it seems that there is no special place for garbage in India! There is garbage everywhere.

It is dumped under trees like this

Empty cartons and plates from the million food vendors that one sees everywhere in India, are piled

View original post 354 more words

Rationale for Decentralized Production of Biogas and Bioethanol

Clean Energy and Water Technologies

We live in a technological world where fuel and power play a critical role in shaping our lives and building our nations. The growth of a nation is measured in terms of fuel and power usage; yet there are many challenges and uncertainties in fuel supply and power generation technologies in recent past due to environmental implications. Fossil fuels accelerated our industrial growth and the civilization . But diminishing supply of oil and gas, global warming, nuclear disasters, social upheavals in the Arabian countries, financial problems, and high cost of renewable energy have created an uncertainty in the energy supply of the future. The future cost of energy is likely to increase many folds yet nobody knows for certain what will be the costs of energy for the next decade or what will be the fuel for our cars.  Renewable energy sources like solar and wind seem to be…

View original post 503 more words

Major Obstacles in India’s Biodiesel Program

The unavailability of sufficient feedstock and lack of R&D to evolve high-yielding drought tolerant Jatropha seeds have been major stumbling blocks. In addition, smaller land holdings, ownership issues with government or community-owned wastelands, lackluster progress by state governments and negligible commercial production of biodiesel have hampered the efforts and investments made by both private and public sector companies.

Another major obstacle in implementing the biodiesel programme has been the difficulty in initiating large-scale cultivation of Jatropha. The Jatropha production program was started without any planned varietal improvement program, and use of low-yielding cultivars made things difficult for smallholders. The higher gestation period of biodiesel crops (3–5 years for Jatropha and 6–8 years for Pongamia) results in a longer payback period and creates additional problems for farmers where state support is not readily available. The Jatropha seed distribution channels are currently underdeveloped as sufficient numbers of processing industries are not operating. There are no specific markets for Jatropha seed supply and hence the middlemen play a major role in taking the seeds to the processing centres and this inflates the marketing margin.

 Biodiesel distribution channels are virtually non-existent as most of the biofuel produced is used either by the producing companies for self-use or by certain transport companies on a trial basis. Further, the cost of biodiesel depends substantially on the cost of seeds and the economy of scale at which the processing plant is operating. The lack of assured supplies of feedstock supply has hampered efforts by the private sector to set up biodiesel plants in India. As of now, only two firms, Naturol Bioenergy Limited and Southern Online Biotechnologies, have embarked on commercial-scale biodiesel projects, both in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. In the absence of seed collection and oil extraction infrastructure, it becomes difficult to persuade entrepreneurs to install trans-esterification plants.

Global Waste-to-Energy Market

The global market for WTE technologies was valued at US$19.9bn in 2008. This has been forecasted to increase to US$26.2bn by 2014. While the biological WTE segment is expected to grow more rapidly from US$1.4bn in 2008 to approximately US$2.5bn in 2014, the thermal WTE segment is nonetheless estimated to still constitute the vast bulk of the entire industry’s worth. This segment was valued at US$18.5bn in 2008 and is forecasted to expand to US$23.7bn in 2014.

The global market for waste to energy technologies has shown substantial growth over the last five years, increasing from $4.83 billion in 2006, to $7.08 billion in 2010 with continued market growth through the global economic downturn. Over the coming decade, growth trends are expected to continue, led by expansion in the US, European, Chinese, and Indian markets. By 2021, based on continued growth in Asian markets combined with the maturation of European waste management regulations and European and US climate mitigation strategies, the annual global market for waste to energy technologies will exceed $27 billion, for all technologies combined.

Asia-Pacific’s waste-to-energy market will post substantial growth by 2015, as more countries view the technology as a sustainable alternative to landfills for disposing waste while generating clean energy. In its new report, Frost & Sullivan said the industry could grow at a compound annual rate of 6.7 percent for thermal waste-to-energy and 9.7 percent for biological waste-to-energy from 2008 to 2015.

The WTE market in Europe is forecasted to expand at an exponential rate and will continue to do so for at least the next 10 years. The continent’s WTE capacity is projected to increase by around 13 million tonnes, with almost 100 new WTE facilities to come online by 2012. In 2008, the WTE market in Europe consisted of approximately 250 players due in large to the use of bulky and expensive centralized WTE facilities, scattered throughout Western Europe.

Trends in Waste-to-Energy Industry

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Around 130 million tonnes of municipal solid waste (MSW) are combusted annually in over 600 waste-to-energy (WTE) facilities globally that produce electricity and steam for district heating and recovered metals for recycling. Since 1995, the global WTE industry increased by more than 16 million tonnes of MSW. Incineration, with energy recovery, is the most common waste-to-energy method employed worldwide. Over the last five years, waste incineration in Europe has generated between an average of 4% to 8% of their countries’ electricity and between an average of 10% to 15% of the continent’s domestic heat.

Currently, the European nations are recognized as global leaders of the SWM and WTE movement. They are followed behind by the Asia Pacific region and North America respectively. In 2007 there are more than 600 WTE plants in 35 different countries, including large countries such as China and small ones such as Bermuda. Some of the newest plants are located in Asia.

The United States processes 14 percent of its trash in WTE plants. Denmark, on the other hand, processes more than any other country – 54 percent of its waste materials. As at the end of 2008, Europe had more than 475 WTE plants across its regions – more than any other continent in the world – that processes an average of 59 million tonnes of waste per annum. In the same year, the European WTE industry as a whole had generated revenues of approximately US$4.5bn. Legislative shifts by European governments have seen considerable progress made in the region’s WTE industry as well as in the implementation of advanced technology and innovative recycling solutions. The most important piece of WTE legislation pertaining to the region has been the European Union’s Landfill Directive, which was officially implemented in 2001 which has resulted in the planning and commissioning of an increasing number of WTE plants over the past five years.