The power of trash

Karachi produces around 10,000 to 12,000 tons of solid waste every day which is burnt at various landfills. The city needs to install a system to collect garbage from its various nodal points and burn it in incinerators outside the city to generate electricity. Low-capacity, mobile incineration units are also available in the market. If the local government cannot make arrangements to pick up garbage from door to door and transport it to the landfill sites for incineration, it can hire a foreign company to do so. The incinerators should not only be installed in Karachi, but they should be set up in every city. It’s strange that the country is wasting a local resource – garbage – to generate electricity but is very keen to import energy from other countries at high prices.

Sweden doesn’t produce enough waste for itself so it buys 800,000 tonnes of refuse from Norway annually to generate electricity from its waste-to-energy plants. The country powers around 2,50,000 homes from the incineration plants. Many countries of the world are using waste-to-energy technology these days. Why can’t Pakistan?

Air-Cdre (r) Azfar A Khan

Rawalpindi