Urban cites are proliferating centers for everything, from a small fast food center to the biggest IT companies. Such propagating cities also generally tend to become the icon for the most significant bases of urban waste generation. Addis Ababa is one such city that has gained all the negative buzz for stashing mountains of waste at its berth.
With the urbanization of the city, Koshe dump site (in Addis Ababa) also urbanized to become the pathway for many waste pickers. The dumping site spreads across an area of 36 football pitches. The waste generated at this site has recorded in polluting nearby rivers, along with producing methane, a dangerous greenhouse gas. Following this, a landslide in 2017 killed 114 people. This national tragedy is believed to have triggered to initiate the action to reduce possible future threat caused due to heaps of waste.
The direful situation in Addis Ababa is expected to escalate, but an Ethiopian entrepreneur; Samuel Alemayehu has plunged into the scene to reverse the situation. He has administered Africa’s first waste-to-energy-plant, popularly called as ‘Reppie WtE Project’ to reduce the detrimental landfill alongside powering urban homes.
According to this entrepreneur, the plant will bear the supply of up to 30% from Addis Ababa’s household energy requirements along with combusting 80% of its waste. This project uses waste as fuel (source) to generate power. The fuel is blazed sustainably. The process is conducted in a combustion chamber in which heat tubes of water are carried out in boiler walls. The plant is expected to burn the capital waste at 1,800 degrees Celsius. The product is later converted into 185 million KW hours of electricity per annum. Another valid element of waste-to-energy plant project is that it is also expected to drive away the problem of unemployment to a certain extent with the beginning of this project.
This is not the first country that is all set to establish Waste-to-energy plants. These projects have already earned fame in Europe for incarnating 25% of its municipal trash. France owns about 126, Germany has 121 and Italy holds 40 waste-to-energy plants. Waste-to-energy plants have generally been incorporated to treat and discard various waste products including municipal solid waste, food waste, commercial and industrial waste, industrial by-products like bagasse, sewage, animal by-products, and waste.
Initiatives like waste-to-energy plant invariably stress the importance and the reliability of sustainability. It justifies the belief that a sustainable life has no negation to worry about in the future.