Hyderabad: Turning Waste into Wealth

The city has unlocked large value by processing its municipal refuse efficiently, blazing a trail for others to follow

- N Madhavan

On a warm mid-April morning, the Jagadgiri Gutta waste transfer station in Hyderabad is a beehive of activity. Scores of small vehicles—locally called swachh autos—line up to deliver waste collected from households in Kukatpally, a suburb in the Northwest of the city. The waste is then compressed and loaded into compactors, air-tight cylindrical containers, which then transport it to a site in Jawahar Nagar, 50kms away, for processing.

Re Sustainability (formerly Ramky Enviro Engineers), one of the largest environmental management services companies in Asia, runs the Jagadgiri Gutta station and 64 other such transfer points across the city. The company bears the responsibility for managing the 9,000 tonnes of municipal waste that Hyderabad generates every day.

As one drives into Jawahar Nagar, on the outskirts of the city, it is hard to believe that it was once the dump zone for Hyderabad's municipal waste. That waste, unloaded day after day for decades, had created a mountain estimated to hold 14 million tonnes of garbage. Today, it houses one of the largest single-location solid municipal waste processing facilities in the world.

The facility comprises two large waste-to-energy plants with a combined capacity of 48 MW, India's largest compost plant, a plastic recycling unit, an advanced refuse-derived fuel (RDF) plant, a landfill, and a facility to tap the gas from legacy landfills and convert it into compressed biogas for use as auto fuel.