Cement, Energy and Environment

. Waste to Wealth & Waste Recycling SOLID WEALTH India is churning out construction and demolition debris at an incredible pace. With landfills overflowing and building material becoming scarce, the country needs a policy to recycle the waste Avikal Somvanshi India needs a landfill the size of West Bengal to dump 21,630 million tonnes of construction and demolition (C&D) waste it wi ll generate from repair and demolition of old buildings and from new ones between 2005 and 2030. And still more land if the waste from infrastructure projects, such as roads and dams, is taken into account, according to an assessment by non-profit Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) in Delhi. CSE's findingc; ring alarm bells at a time when urban areas across the country are witnessing a real estate boom, and the new government plans to create 1 00 smart cities as part of its development agenda. Unfortunately, there is no up-to-date official data on the magnitude of the problem. On February 6, replying to a question raised in the Rajya Sabha, the Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD) said there are no current estimates on the amount of C&D waste generated in the country. Worse, the handful of government estimates available for C&D waste are at variance with each other and fail to capture the real picture. Consider this. In 2000, an estimate by MOUD showed that India generated 10-12 million tonnes of C&D waste a year. A decade later, a report by the ..,. Union Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) gave the same estimate (see 'Diverging estimates'). This is when, according to the McKinsey and Company, a global management consulting firm, the area under real estate grew by 6-7 per cent a year between 2001 and 2010. At this rate, shows CSE calculation , the country would have generated 531 mill ion tonnes of C&D waste in 2013. The Comptroller Auditor General of India recognises this discrepancy in its 2008 report . Government estimates on C&D waste are without a scientific base. No estimates or even guesstimates exist for construction and demolition waste , it notes. One can think of only one reason for this incongruous government data: most of the C&D waste generated in the country is unaccounted for. With landfills overflowing with garbage and in the absence of policy to regulate C&D waste disposal, developers, including government agencies, dump the waste in low-lying or watershed areas, roadsides and even on vacant plots and fields. In fact, disappearance of urban water bodies and wetlands in urban areas can be attributed to illegal dumping of C&D waste. In most cases, real estate developers deliberately do this to reclaim eco-sensitive areas for real estate. In Mumbai, bui lders dump C&D waste in the coastal mangroves and creeks. In Delhi, the Yamuna floodplain is the favourite dumping ground. Recently, the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation faced the fury of the National Green Tribunal for choking the Yamuna floodplains with C&D waste. The situation is equally worrisome in neighbouring Gurgaon which saw a private real estate boom in the 2000s that is continuing to this day. Developers regularly dump debris on vacant plots, water bodies (commonly known asjohars) and low-lying areas of the eco-sensitive Aravalli hills. Frustrated by the inaction of the municipal authority, Malba Hatao Group, a Gurgaon-based, citizen-driven initiative fighting for a comprehensive pol icy on Developers deliberately dump building debris in low-lying or watershed areas to reclaim eco-sensitive zones for real estate debris and recycling of C&D waste, approached the National Green Tribunal in October 201 3. A rap from the tribunal has elicited action from Municipal Corporation of 32 ·1