Economy & Market

Eliminating landfills

Published

8 years ago

December 30, 2017

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The problem of tackling house hold waste is alarming and the infrastructure to handle that by the local bodies on the verge of collapse.
India today collects close to 1,00,000 tonnes of waste per day (the generation is higher and so we see the waste everywhere). And as we urbanise, this problem will only dramatically increase. We all know the reasons for this problem. Increasing urbanisation, coupled with economic development and modern living styles have created this monumental problem in the form of solid waste for urban India. Past frugal habits, almost no use of packaging, no knowledge of plastics, a limited population that was largely rural have given way to a scenario where municipal solid waste generation occurs at each step, without much thought going into the aggregated municipal solid waste (MSW) heaps that are becoming an integral part of our urban (and partially, even rural) landscape.
So what do we do? The first and most obvious and desirable step that has been talked about for some time is: Reduce, Recycle, and Reuse.
But at this stage in our country’s development, this is easier said than done. As we urbanise, some of our past practices are dying and being replaced with new, more convenient practices. I remember, when I was younger, my mother would never go to the market without a bag (typically cloth) of her own. Then, along came plastic bags at each hawkers’ end and out went the earlier re-usable cloth bags. Thus now all the vegetables come home in their own plastic bags. If we also look at most products we buy today, the packing has gone up dramatically.
Similarly, the new urban economy has given a boost to the attitude of convenience and thus changed our age old ways of recycling and reusing. Thus while the Rs 3 as they are called should be the aim of each one of us, we should understand that these generally go against current human behaviour, find limited acceptance and even if successful, will still leave large quantities requiring treatment and safe disposal/utilisation.
MSW collection and management has thus become one of the most difficult and expensive tasks for most municipalities and municipal corporations across the world and in India. Most municipal bodies either spend a substantial part of their budget on this or just see this as a problem with no solution. Even where the waste is being collected, there are limited technical solutions available to handle the waste effectively.Current status
The only real solutions that exist today are listed below:
Landfilling: Most waste collected in the country today is sent to an identified landfill. The landfills are not really scientifically designed and this leads to issues of groundwater contamination (the leachate generated in landfills should be trapped and treated but this is seldom done), air emissions, etc. As the quantum of waste grows, the landfills start choking and become a physical hazard as well. Recently there have been news reports of people dying due to part of the kachra in the landfills collapsing and falling on people (Delhi). In Deonar, Mumbai, parts of the landfill caught fire leading to all of Mumbai suffering smog. These are just a couple of examples but we read and hear such depressing stories each day! Similar stories come from other parts of the world as well like Colombo, Kenya, etc. Thus the landfill can only be an interim solution and that too is becoming an increasingly difficult solution to implement as no one, including villagers, want these landfills in their backyards and for very obvious reasons! Composting: As per the National Green Tribunal Guidelines, the wet waste (food waste, dung, vegetable and fruit waste, etc) should be composted and the compost so generated should be used as fertilizer. A few sites are doing this but this finally treats less than 10 per cent of the incoming waste. Thus there has to be a solution to handle the balance.Waste to energy: This seems to be the only real solution that can get rid of the waste in an economical and sustainable manner. But at this point of time, the technology available is complex, has emissions issues and is not available for villages, towns and smaller cities (typical combustion plants need at least 500 tonnes of waste per day). Many of the plants installed earlier have been shut down due to emission issues. Parameters of an Ideal solution
The ideal solution should thus be a waste to energy technology that does below:

It will need to substantially reduce the volume of the waste – ideally it should lead to all waste being processed and should send nothing to landfills
The process should generate wealth – fertilizer, gas / power, etc., ensuring that the bane of MSW could become a boon
The solution should be usable in small towns as well as large cities
Even for large cities, the solution should allow decentralised processing to minimise transportation and related costs/issues
Emissions should be in keeping with all norms as defined worldwide
The solution should be financially viable

An innovative solution
Under this very gloomy scenario, there seems to be a glimmer of hope as a new and promising technology has come to convert most kinds of waste to energy. The technology uses the process of gasification to breakdown the solid waste into a combustible gas called syngas. This gas is then used to generate heat or power.

The technology uses all fractions of MSW without extensive segregation and coupled with composting/biogas plants, ensures that nothing goes to landfills. Part of the in-feed is given out as totally benign ash that can be used for roads while the balance material is converted to gas
The way the systems are designed ensures that all emissions norms are met
The systems are designed for distributed use. Thus, the smallest system is a 2.5 tonne per day plant and the largest can handle up to 200 tonne per day. This allows use of the technology in small towns as well as large cities
The systems ensure that at current waste to energy power tariffs, the projects can be financially viable, particularly if small support/viability gap funding is made available
The systems have been designed, developed and made in India

A typical configuration uses about 100 tonnes of waste to generate about 1.8 MW of power. It is envisaged that apart from using these systems in towns and villages, the systems can also be used to distribute waste processing in larger cities. This will ensure that the transport costs for the waste are much reduced.
Come, let’s use this ‘Made in India" technology to create Swachh Bharat!The menace of waste
As a citizen of this country and this world, I increasingly get concerned about many issues we as a society face. Of all our issues, one of the larger ones is the waste we as a race generate. And there is no real solution in sight to this problem, particularly for small town and cities.The numbers are telling: Human beings as they develop produce more and more waste. Urban Indian’s average waste generation per capita is today 400 grams per day. For the US, it is at a staggering 2,500 grams per capita per day, and we seem to be slowly but surely moving in that direction – a frightening prospect indeed!
The world today generates close to 2 billion tonnes of waste per annum. This is up from about 1.3 billion tonne in 2010 (as per World Bank numbers). This number will probably grow to more than 2.2 billion in 2020.Authors:
The article is authored by Dr BC Jain, Chairman, Ankur Scientific, Baroda.

Economy & Market

TSR Will Define Which Cement Companies Win India’s Net-Zero Race

Published

3 days ago

April 27, 2026

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Jignesh Kundaria, Director and CEO, Fornnax Technology

India is simultaneously grappling with two crises: a mounting waste emergency and an urgent need to decarbonise its most carbon-intensive industries. The cement sector, the second-largest in the world and the backbone of the nation’s infrastructure ambitions, sits at the centre of both. It consumes enormous quantities of fossil fuel, and it has the technical capacity to consume something else entirely: the waste our cities cannot get rid of.

According to CPCB and NITI Aayog projections, India generates approximately 62.4 million tonnes of municipal solid waste annually, with that figure expected to reach 165 million tonnes by 2030. Much of this waste is energy-rich and non-recyclable. At the same time, cement kilns operate at material temperatures of approximately 1,450 degrees Celsius, with gas temperatures reaching 2,000 degrees. This high-temperature environment is ideal for co-processing, ensuring the complete thermal destruction of organic compounds without generating toxic residues. The physics are in our favour. The infrastructure is not.

Pre-processing is not the support act for co-processing. It is the main event. Get the particle size wrong, get the moisture wrong, get the calorific value wrong and your kiln thermal stability will suffer the consequences.

The Regulatory Push Is Real

The Solid Waste Management (SWM) Rules 2026 mandate that cement plants progressively replace solid fossil fuels with Refuse-Derived Fuel (RDF), starting at a 5 per cent baseline and scaling to 15 per cent within six years. NITI Aayog’s 2026 Roadmap for Cement Sector Decarbonisation targets 20 to 25 per cent Thermal Substitution Rate (TSR) by 2030. Beyond compliance, every tonne of coal replaced by RDF generates measurable carbon reductions which is monetisable under India’s emerging Carbon Credit Trading Scheme (CCTS). TSR is no longer a sustainability metric. It is a financial lever.

Yet our own field assessments across multiple Indian cement plants reveal a sobering reality: the primary barrier to scaling AFR adoption is not waste availability. It is the fragmented and under-engineered pre-processing ecosystem that sits between the waste and the kiln.

Why Indian Waste Is a Different Engineering Problem

Indian municipal solid waste is not the material that imported shredding equipment was designed for. Our waste streams frequently exceed 40 per cent to 50 per cent moisture content, particularly during monsoon cycles, saturated with abrasive inerts including sand, glass, and stone. Plants relying on imported OEM equipment face months of downtime awaiting proprietary spare parts. Machines built for segregated, low-moisture waste fail quickly and disrupt the entire pre-processing operation in Indian conditions.

The two most common failures we observe are what I call the biting teeth problem and the chewing teeth problem. Plants relying solely on a primary shredder reduce bulk waste to large fractions, but the output remains too coarse for stable kiln combustion. Others attempt to use a secondary shredder as a standalone unit without a primary stage to pre-size the feed, leading to catastrophic mechanical failure. When both stages are present but mismatched in throughput capacity, the system becomes a bottleneck. Achieving the 40 to 70 tonnes per hour required for meaningful coal displacement demands a precisely coordinated two-stage process.

Engineering a Made-in-India Answer

At Fornnax, our response to these challenges is grounded in one principle: Indian waste demands Indian engineering. Our systems are built around feedstock homogeneity, the holy grail of kiln stability. Consistent particle size and predictable calorific value are the foundation of stable kiln combustion. Without them, no TSR target is achievable at scale.

Our SR-MAX2500 Dual Shaft Primary Shredder (Hydraulic Drive) processes raw, baled, or loosely mixed MSW, C&I waste, bulky waste, and plastics, reducing them to approximately 150 mm fractions at throughputs of up to 40 tonnes per hour. The R-MAX 3300 Single Shaft Secondary Shredder (Hydraulic Drive), introduced in 2025, takes that primary output and produces RDF fractions in the 30 to 80 mm range at up to 30 tonnes per hour, specifically optimised for consistent kiln feeding. We have also introduced electric drive configurations under the SR-100 HD series, with capacities between 5 and 40 tonnes per hour, already operational at a leading Indian waste-processing facility.

Looking ahead, Fornnax is expanding its portfolio with the upcoming SR-MAX3600 Hydraulic Drive primary shredder at up to 70 tonnes per hour and the R-MAX2100 Hydraulic drive secondary shredder at up to 20 tonnes per hour, designed specifically for the large-scale throughput that higher TSR ambitions require.

The Investment Case Is Now

The 2070 Net-Zero target is not a distant goal for India’s cement sector. It starts today, with decisions being made on the plant floor.

The SWM Rules 2026 are already in effect, requiring cement plants to replace coal with RDF. Carbon credit markets are opening up, and coal prices are not going to get cheaper. Every tonne of coal a cement plant replaces with waste-derived fuel saves money on one side and generates carbon credit revenue on the other. Pre-processing infrastructure is no longer just a compliance requirement. It is a business investment with a measurable return.

The good news is that nothing is missing. The technology works. The waste is available in every Indian city. The government has provided the policy direction. The only thing standing between where the industry is today and where it needs to be is the commitment to build the right infrastructure.

The cement companies that move now will not just meet the regulations. They will be ahead of every competitor that waits.

About The Author

Jignesh Kundaria is the Director and CEO of Fornnax Technology. Over an experience spanning more than two decades in the recycling industry, he has established himself as one of India’s foremost voices on waste-to-fuel technology and alternative fuel infrastructure.

Concrete

WCA Welcomes SiloConnect as associate corporate member

Published

2 weeks ago

April 13, 2026

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The World Cement Association (WCA) has announced SiloConnect as its newest associate corporate member, expanding its network of technology providers supporting digitalisation in the cement industry. SiloConnect offers smart sensor technology that provides real-time visibility of cement inventory levels at customer silos, enabling producers to monitor stock remotely and plan deliveries more efficiently. The solution helps companies move from reactive to proactive logistics, improving delivery planning, operational efficiency and safety by reducing manual inspections. The technology is already used by major cement producers such as Holcim, Cemex and Heidelberg Materials and is deployed across more than 30 countries worldwide.

Concrete

TotalEnergies and Holcim Launch Floating Solar Plant in Belgium

Published

2 weeks ago

April 13, 2026

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TotalEnergies and Holcim have commissioned a floating solar power plant in Obourg, Belgium, built on a rehabilitated former chalk quarry that has been converted into a lake. The project has a generation capacity of 31 MW and produces around 30 GWh of renewable electricity annually, which will be used to power Holcim’s nearby industrial operations. The project is currently the largest floating solar installation in Europe dedicated entirely to industrial self-consumption. To ensure minimal impact on the surrounding landscape, more than 700 metres of horizontal directional drilling were used to connect the solar installation to the electrical substation. The project reflects ongoing collaboration between the two companies to support industrial decarbonisation through renewable energy solutions and innovative infrastructure development.