Turning waste to value through public-private partnership

The State government on Monday signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Dutch government and Waste2Value Consortium, to carry out waste and water management projects in Karnataka on a public-private partnership model.

After signing the MoU, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah told the media that a 600 MT unit will be set up in Bengaluru City, where mixed waste will be processed to produce biogas, which will be used to generate electricity.

The State government will purchase the electricity generated by the consortium. Bengaluru alone generates around 5,000 MT of waste every day.

The government has identified two to three areas, but is yet to finalise a location to set up this unit, which he said, will be operational in the next six months. Around 25 acres is required to set up the unit.

The Rs 270-crore project will be partially funded by the Dutch government and nine companies from the Netherlands, part of the Waste2Value consortium, which have guaranteed that it will be an “odorless” and “zero waste” project.

The government will write to the Karnataka State Electricity Commission (KERC) asking it to fix the rate at which power can be sold by the consortium, added Siddaramaiah.

European standards
As the proposal consists of waste management techniques that follow European standards and norms, the consortium will also be required to obtain the required permissions from the Karnataka State Pollution Control Board (KSPCB).
The companies will have to comply with the Municipal Solid Waste Management (MSW) 2000 rules and regulations.

If this pilot project becomes successful, similar units will be set up in other parts of the City, and will also be extended to other cities in the State, including Mysuru. The consortium has also signed MoUs with the governments of Himachal Pradesh, Maharashtra and Goa. In Goa, a 130 MT unit will become functional in a few weeks. Here, the electricity generated will be evacuated to the industries directly.

The MoU
The Dutch ambassador, Alphonsus Stoelinga, who inked the MoU with the State government, said that his nation, which was also thickly populated, had been actively converting waste to electricity since 1980s. The same models would be replicated in India too.

Nexus Novus, which is based out of both Amsterdam and Bengaluru, is a consulting company. It is spearheading around nine Dutch companies which have invested in the projects in India.

Rutger de Brujin, Director, Nexus Novus, said that around 7 KV electricity will be produced every hour by generating methane from decaying organic matters of the waste.
The waste will be segregated mechanically using in-house technologies.

In May 2013, the Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment, the Netherlands, and Ministry of Urban Development, India, signed an MoU to enable technical cooperation in various domains between the two countries.

Waste and waste water were one of the strong focuses of the partnership, leading to the spin-off of a private consortia ‘Waste2Value’ on September 30, 2014, by the Ministry of Trade and Development, the Netherlands.

The consortium has more than 60 projects around the world.

Lakes
The consortium has also submitted proposals for cleaning up the Bellandur and Varthur lakes in Bengaluru.