Phoenix rising

When broken down boulders and rubble waste sit by the roadside or at a demolition site for months on end, as they do in most of our cities, rarely does the thought arise where does it all go from here?

The unfortunate answer is that this material, made up of sand, gravel, bricks and cement generated during demolition and construction of housing and infrastructure exercises, mostly lands up in all the wrong places. It roughly constitutes a third of the total municipal solid waste.

Instead of being viewed as a resource that could be put to efficient use, this waste occupies significant space in landfills adding to their height and hurdle. Or else it finds its way into rivers and other waterways, choking their flow, polluting the water and causing innumerable hazards downstream. Its presence seriously jeopardises processing of bio-degradable as well as recyclable waste.

And as urbanisation goes forward with the prediction of 590 million population living in cities in India by 2030, the problem will only magnify. According to a report by German development agency GIZ and environment organisation Development Alternatives (DA) on material consumption patterns, in 2009 India was the third-largest consumer of materials in the world after China and the US. In that year, India accounted for 7.1 per cent (4.83 billion tonnes) of global material consumption.

“India’s material consumption in the past few decades exhibit a pattern typical of countries making a transition from an agrarian society to an industrial society, where the consumption of non-renewable materials increases, in particular minerals and metals required for building infrastructure and fossil fuels for energy supply,” says the report. It adds that if current economic trends persist and population grows according to predictions, India’s material requirements are projected to be nearly 15 billion tonnes by 2030 and little above 25 billion tonnes by 2050.

What does this mean? That we will have to scale up on extraction and mining of resources, which has already created serious environmental impact in many parts of the country, often leading to mining restrictions, mass protests and supply disruptions.

Logically, with such a huge requirement for material, is not resource management the best option, including making full use of the massive C&D (Construction & Demolition) waste we generate? Data for 2001 shows that 10-14 million tons of C&D waste is generated annually and only 20 per cent of it is recycled. Though there has been talk of appropriate management of C& D waste for over a decade, no serious organised effort has been made in this respect. Nor has there been a national policy formulated or sound guidelines enforced. However, the Ministry of Environment, Forest & Climate Change in 2016 made it mandatory for all major cities to implement a C&D waste management plan. Currently only Delhi and Ahmedabad have started such an exercise on a pilot basis.

What exactly does management of C&D waste entail? As in other waste strategies here too the 3R principle is applicable — Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. Apart from this if a plan to ‘deconstruct’ instead of ‘demolish’ is followed, it could lead to minimising waste generation, reusing the salvaged material such as window panes, doors, shutters and recycling the aggregates.

It is these left-over aggregates that are under the microscope now, being studied for their best use, whether alone or when combined with other materials. Towards this end an interesting Indo-German bilateral cooperation project on resource efficiency (RE) to promote C&D waste recycling is underway.

Its main aim is to enable key institutions responsible for environment, climate, industry and resources policy to establish institutional frameworks to improve resource efficiency. It will also look towards establishing a link between conserving the resources and recycling raw materials, while it helps save costs, strengthen competitiveness of industries and meet future demand for resources. Towards this a pilot project is currently in progress.

“In a public-private partnership between the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) and Amdavad Enviro Projects Pvt Ltd (AEP) C&D waste is collected and processed and turned into paving blocks, bricks and other products from recycled aggregates,” explains DA researcher Vaibhav Rathi. “However, AEP has been facing challenges in terms of standardising the products and selling them in the market.”

Director of the project Uwe Becker says that this often happens. “Any new product, especially those made from recycled “waste”, faces initial difficulty in market penetration,” says Becker. “There is the classic chicken-and-egg problem. Entrepreneurs are hesitant to invest if there is no apparent market demand and consumers are hesitant to buy something that is apparently untested and not widely prevalent. So this is not a new problem and experience shows that this bottleneck can be overcome with innovative policies.”

The RE project is helping to address precisely these challenges. As a first it has facilitated the internationally recognised ‘Get It Green’ certification according to Product Environmental Protocol – ISO1402 standards. Audit and certification conducted by ICMQ - India involved process monitoring and recording improvements at the processing facility. The RE project has developed prototypes of new products for AEP with technical specifications set by the Bureau of Indian Standards.

“Market uptake of products will partly depend on local market conditions. For example, where natural sand or natural stone aggregates are scarce or expensive, recycled coarse or fine aggregates from CDW can be sold as their substitute,” says Becker. “The experience with the first plants in Delhi and Ahmedabad have shown that non-load bearing products such as paving blocks for pedestrian or parking zones, kerb stones, concrete blocks (say for boundary walls), etc. have been the most popular items so far. Under a properly designed management plan, for example if the waste collection and transportation distances are not too great, CDW based products can be 10 to 20 per cent cheaper than conventional products. As the market matures in future, a wider and more sophisticated product range is possible as the experience from Europe shows. The commercial viability of a CDW recycling enterprise and products depends in large part on a comprehensive management plan developed in coordination with the municipal government.”

The certified products of AEP have been now listed in the Green Rating and Integrated Habitat Assessment (GRIHA) catalogue. Though these are recognised by the government and being promoted through conferences and workshops, there is still a long way to go as the BIS takes as long as five years to certify such products.

So, how can the government help in the short term even as it should try to hasten the certification process? Experts feel that the government can put in place buy back and preferential procurement policies that could help entrepreneurs who come forward to tackle and recycle C&D waste into reusable products.

Apart from more such pilots, what is important is the first objective of the bilateral corporation project — to push through a national level policy on resource efficiency. GIZ has formulated an India Resource Panel comprising 10 people whose recommendations will help the Indian government take forward the goal towards building a circular economy in this sector. The faster, the better.

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