Boparai said that among the established technologies, biomethanation, pyrolysis, pellestisation, incineration and sanitary land-filling are most promising and are readily available for adoption.

Boparai was inaugurating a national workshop on energy recovery from urban and municipal wastes organised jointly by Ficci and ministry of non-conventional energy sources.

He said that each of these technologies is suitable for certain minimum levels of waste quantities and their composition. In this context, the national and international consultants have an important role to play to suitably advise the civic authorities and developers on the best option.Boparai said due care needs to be exercised in the initial design phase so that the plants, whenset up, operate without any problems and serve the purpose for which it was intended.

He said that if the waste-to energy programme is to take off rapidly, there is a need to ensure wider participation of the private sector in this area. Projects for generation of power from MSW generated in a few cities, namely Lucknow, Kanpur, Nagpur, Pune, Chennai, Bhopal, Indore and Hyderabad have been planned by the respective municipal corporations associating private entrepreneurs.

Many other municipal corporations have also taken initiative in this direction, he said. Some of the general issues in the way of such projects are availability of land, garbage and buy back of power by state electricity boards. All these issues can be addressed if the state governments announce a policy in this regard, he added.

A senior official from the ministry of non-conventional energy sources U N Panjiar stated that various ownership and management models are effectively working in the area of methane generation from municipalsolid and liquid waste and also for power generation from methane gas.

It is not necessary that the owner of the landfill site or the municipal body owning the waste water treatment plant should also own and manage the systems for methane recovery, scrubbing, compression, transmission and power generation systems.