‘PCB may have no say on proposed WTE plant in Siddapur’
Hyderabad: In a report that places a major question mark on the functioning of waste-to-energy (WTE) plants such as the ones at the Jawaharnagar dump yard here, the Centre for Financial Accountability (CFA) has said that WTE incineration plants were the single most polluting industrial sector in the country, surpassing open-cast coal mining, copper smelters, and thermal power plants.
Its report released on Friday in Delhi, the CFA said the included findings were based on official monitoring data and inspection records of the Central Pollution Control Board, and the Delhi Pollution Control Committee. This data that was submitted to the Supreme Court and the National Green Tribunal, the CFA said, showed that WTE facilities score a cumulative Pollution Index of 100 out of 100, making them some of the most polluting entities.
In a news release, the CFA said that as far as Telangana was concerned, the findings pointed to a “catastrophic failure in Hyderabad’s centralised waste management model,” turning the city’s infrastructure into a severe public health crisis and a global climate burden.
Despite boasting of India’s largest single-location incineration capacity in the form of two plants with total capacity of 48 MW which are operated by Re-Sustainability Ltd at Jawaharnagar, a study had shown that the dump yard “emits a staggering 5.9 tonnes of methane per hour. This makes it India’s top methane emitter from waste and the fourth largest globally, leaking 49,000 tonnes of methane annually and a global warming potential of 3.96 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year,” CFA said.
The study, supported by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and conducted by UCLA scientist using Carbon Mapper satellite data, said that the “massive methane plume debunks claims that incineration resolves municipal solid waste issues.” The burning of high-moisture organic (wet) waste which constitutes around 60 per cent of the fuel in the WTE plant at Jawaharnagar, the CFA said was inefficient, releases massive volumes of carbon dioxide while leaving unprocessed waste to decompose into methane.
The CFA also questioned the Telangana government’s plans for a new 4,000 tonnes per day WTE and waste facility at Siddapur in Rangareddy district, “under the euphemistic Eco-Town moniker.”
It said the proposed plant was reclassified under CPCB’s 2025 ‘Blue’ category, thereby allowing it to bypass mandatory public hearings and environmental impact assessments (EIA) for industries in other CPCB categories. Villagers in and around Siddapur, it said, fear Jawaharnagar-style heavy metal contamination and air pollution.
The CFA also said that the ‘Blue’ category reclassification “severely weakens the Telangana Pollution Control Board’s ability to hold WTE operators accountable.”
In real terms, this regulatory ‘bluewashing’ shields failed operators from environmental compensation, strips local communities of their statutory right to public consultation, and deepens ecological injustice while locking public funds into unviable incineration infrastructure instead of decentralized biomethanation and circular waste solutions, the CFA said.
This article was originally in Deccan Chronicle you can read it here.
