Noida Sanitation Issue

Lack of Sanitation in NOIDA 

Noida the show window of the state of Utter Pradesh, is facing serious sanitation problems. Every day Noida generates 300 tons of Municipal Solid Waste, out of which 65% is organic waste, 20% is recyclable waste and the remaining 15% is inert waste (Waste such as chip packets, mud, construction derbies).

“Sanitation” is one of the most pressing issue’s faced by the city of Noida today. While driving around in the city you will find numerous dumps, outside residential areas, market places and industrial areas. Noida development authority is responsible for collection of waste from residential, commercial and industrial areas located within Noida, but as of now mostly the unorganized sector comprised of rag pickers and young children shoulder this responsibility. To add fuel to the fire Noida authority has no official landfill site where inert waste can be taken and dumped in a scientific manner. This adds to the problem of illegal waste dumps that we see all over the city.  

I wonder how Noida Authority failed to foresee this. In spite of few Private companies like “Eco Wise Waste Management Pvt. Ltd.” Which is working hard to improve the environmental condition in Noida for last five years. The initiative from the government and the private sector is missing.

Recently an article printed in the “HT Live Noida” of Hindustan Times also discussed about the sanitation problem in Noida. According to them these are the problem faced in Noida.

1.   

    Ssanitation :- Garbage is strewn everywhere on the roads, on the pavements, even covering the vacant plots, big market areas like sector-18 market.

2.       Dumped Material :- None of the roads internal or external, are free of heaps of construction material, bricks, cement & iron rods are dumped everywhere.

3.       Roads & Drains :- Most internal roads have not carpeted.

4.       Slum Cluster :- The number of slums has increased so much so that now an entire basti has been established here.

It is time the government starts thinking beyond the commercial angle & working towards environmental development of the city.

Waste To Energy Project

Waste To Energy Project

Close to 97% of food waste in North America ends up in landfills. That’s trash that could be cost-effectively turned into renewable fuel using waste to energy technology, says Paul Sellew, chief executive of waste to energy firm Harvest Power. The Waltham, Mass. company announced Wednesday that it raised a $51.7 billion Series B round of funding, which will help it ramp up the pace at which it is building facilities to turn yard and food waste into methane, the principal component of natural gas using its waste to energy technology. The new funding brings the total equity financing raised by Harvest Power to roughly $70 million, Sellew said.




Harvest Power is currently in the process of building two large anaerobic digestion facilities, one in Richmond, outside Vancouver, Canada and the other in London, Ontario. There it plans to take food and yard waste and turn them into methane, which can be sold as a fuel. Harvest Power also operates large composting facilities in California and the northeastern U.S. In Tullytown, Penn., it runs Waste Management’s Warner North Composting Facility. Waste Management is an investor in Harvest Power, as is venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins (home to billionaire venture capitalist John Doerr) and Munich Venture Partners. New investors in the latest round include former vice president Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management. (For more on Sellew’s entrepreneurial background, read Meet The Renewable Entrepreneur, written by my colleague Maureen Farrell last August.)



What was surprising: Sellew didn’t boast about any special technological advantage that Harvest Power has. He admits that anaerobic digesters and composting are well understood technologies. “We have created a novel approach…and we have gained a cost advantage,” Sellew said in a phone interview. “It’s the efficiency, it’s the capital cost, operating cost, productivity and yield we get out of our technologies.” So couldn’t some other large operator of composting facilities do the same? Sellew says the market is fragmented and the company really doesn’t have large competitors.



Harvest Power’s model is to design, build, own and operate its own facilities. Sellew wouldn’t give me a sense of how profitable these facilities can be, but he said he expects the company to be profitable this year, on a run rate of $100 million revenues. By the end of next year, it expects to expand operations from its five current facilities to 20, just in north America. “We view this as similar to next generation solar. We’re taking a waste material and extracting the energy out of it. We can produce energy 24/7, 365 days a year,” says Sellew. Of course, methane has a bigger carbon footprint than solar energy does.



A handful of cities, including San Francisco, require residents to separate food waste from other garbage. San Francisco currently has a large compost facility that turns food waste into fertilizer. Sellew expects more cities to adopt such policies, a move that could create more business for his company.