Treating Garbage: Lessons From Oslo

The heat and dust of elections and the race to the gaddi at Vidhana Soudha may have pushed the city's garbage issue underground for now. But like a bad penny it cannot be wished away and its stench is only round the corner.

The much touted drive for waste segregation had met with limited success and is confined to few pockets. Deep seated habits like poor civic sense and caste prejudice, coupled with government's half-hearted measures have ensured that it is no way successful in mitigating the garbage pile ups that dot the city's street corners.

The other day I happened to read New York Times link forwarded by a friend on waste management done in the Norwegian capital Oslo. It was quite literally an eye opener. Oslo has a waste-to-energy incinearator on its outskirts and it turns garbage into heat and electricity. Roughly half the city and most of its schools are heated by burning garbage.

Households separate their garbage, putting food waste in green plastic bags, plastics in blue bags and glass elsewhere. The bags are handed out free at groceries and other stores. The plants uses computerised sensors to separate the color-coded garbage bags that race across conveyor belts and into incinerators.

Household trash, industrial waste, even toxic and dangerous waste from hospitals is grist to the incinerator. Its appetite is so huge that the city's garbage is just not enough and hence it is shipped in from faraway places such as England, Ireland and neighbouring Sweden to keep the plant running. It has even set sights on the American market.

And mind you Norway is no way starved of fossil fuel reserves. It is a major exporter of oil and gas, and has abundant coal reserves.

In fact the whole of North Europe has become a hub for waste to energy plants and Oslo is now facing tough competition from Swedish capital Stockholm. Environmentalists there fear that in order to keep these plants running people may be encouraged to produce more waste!

It holds an important lesson not just to Bangalore, but to whole of India. The country is urbanising at a brisk pace and even Tier 2 and 3 cities are feeling the pressures of overcrowding and strain on infrastructure. Already our cities are getting reduced to eyesores and badly need such innovative measures to treat garbage.

Moreover with most parts of the country are reeling under power cuts, the power generated by these units could lessen burden on our power plants and grids. It will also lessen the environmental cost in setting up a thermal or nuclear plant. And I am sure that in India raw materials will never be a problem for these garbage plants.

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