And it was decided that the garbage mountain will be disappeared…

If certain certainties are comforting, then it often means that the uncomfortable is getting shoved under a carpet in a rarely-used room or dumped in an out-of-view storage facility. 

Clean environments are pretty because the ugly stuff gets collected and dumped somewhere else. The problem is that if what’s ugly is not sorted out at that faraway place we don’t have to visit, it grows. It grows and grows. It grows until it can grow no more and blows up, scattering gooey stuff, both material and non-material, all over the place and polluting our comfort zones be it the TV in the house or the Facebook newsfeed. 

That’s what ‘Meethotamulla’ was all about; a ‘faraway’ that suddenly walked into our homes and plonked itself on the dinner table. What was first a small-scale dumping site for Mulleriyawa and Kolonnawa became the destination for all waste collected in the Colombo Municipality area after the methane build-up at the Bloemendhal site caused it to explode on 8 March 2009. And in April this year, Meethotamulla blew up, literally, claiming over 25 lives and displacing over 180 families. 

Such disasters brings things to a head. And this is how a project that ought to have been up and running at least five years ago and was still dragging its feet suddenly decided to walk, so to speak. 

In 2009, following Vasudeva Nanayakkara filed a Fundamental Rights application on behalf of the affected residents. The Supreme Court directed the Colombo Municipal Council outlawed tipping fees (which made for a lot of corruption and the creation of a garbage-mafia) and to go for a revenue generating waste-to-energy project. 

Tenders were called. Western Power Company bid for the tender and secured it in 2009. It was not just a mountain of garbage that had to be cleared, it was soon found out. Western Power Company, had a long story to tell. 

“We obtained 3.5 acres of clear land near the Meethotamulla dump site from the Urban Development Authority (UDA) for Rs 140 million. However, it was 16 months later that we got possession of the land. By this time, the demarcated area was covered in garbage. The entire area is 12 acres in extent, so we asked for a different plot. The process dragged on for three years. 

“The then Defence Secretary was sceptical about the project. He was of the view that Sri Lankan garbage cannot be incinerated as it was too wet. He believed that the solution to the Colombo garbage disposal problem was to have a landfill in Puttalam…”

So that’s how things were back then. Slow. And when the new Government came to power in January 2015, the process had to begin all over again even though the project had gone through a comprehensive EIA process conducted by the Central Environment Authority (CEA) and full approval obtained in 2012.

“We lobbied the key officials and ministers. There were naturally many concerns. For example the moisture content in the waste. So we got down experts from a Japanese company which set up the first waste-to-energy plant in that country, counted over 40 years of experience in the field and had built over 500 such plants all over the world. They made a presentation to the Megapolis Minister Patali Champika Ranawaka and convinced him of the viability. 

“It was tough. We had to convince everyone. The institutions were not seeing eye-to-eye with one another. They all had to agree. We must say that Minister Ranawaka played an important role in all this. He moved a mountain of obstacles especially with respect to issued faced by the CEB. Minister Ranawaka also acknowledged the difficulty of getting the project off the ground. Apart from the non-negotiable such as the Environment Impact Assessment, he cleared the way on several issues in 2016 and 2017.

“This was not just another power generation project, this was a revenue generating self-sustaining project to resolve a grave social issue and a serious public concern, namely garbage disposal. It was only right and inevitable for the State to provide some kind of assistance, especially in terms of purchasing power.”

Pradip Jayawardene, whose concerns for the environment and for social justice are well-known, played a key facilitating role in the entire process. 

Jayawardene concurred about the monumental task of convincing people.

“The Minister was naturally not ready to accept the argument without adequate information on the technical aspects. I realised that there was scepticism. So we arranged to bring down experts from the Japanese company, we arranged a seminar at the Ministry and invited officials from the UDA and other State agencies. 

“One of the issues brought up was high moisture content of the waste. Several studies had been done and the conclusion was that since the moisture content was high the calorific value was too low to generate sufficient energy until it was explained that the incineration technology was able to deal with this.

“It also came out that there was an issue with the sampling process. The samples were small because they had to fit the bomb calorimeter. So although they had tested over a long period the non-homogenous nature of the material, given the variation, meant that the findings were not necessarily accurate or conclusive. Finally, everyone was convinced that our waste was not different to that in other parts of the world.”

Jayawardene worked hard to find the current new site at Muthurajwela. 

“The Sri Lanka Land Reclamation & Development Corporation (SLLR&DC) suggested alternatives and finally in mid-2016, 10 acres in Muthurajawela were approved.”

It had to be leased for Rs. 400 million paid in three instalments. 

The main partner of Western Power Company Ltd. was Aitken Spence PLC while the original developer Earthwatts Lanka Ltd. remains in the company. 

The project expressed appreciation for the support rendered by Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, Minister Ranawaka, Megapolis Project Chairman Ajita de Costa, the then UDA Chairman Ranjit Fernando, Megapolis Ministry Secretary Nihal Rupasinghe and the then CEA Director General Muthukudarachchi. “It took the combined effort of all these individuals and other officials in the particular institutions to get this vital project to where we are today.”

The project will deal only with the waste from the Colombo Municipal area, approximately 700 metric tons every day; the contract to be shortly signed with the CMC . The plant will supply 10 MW of electricity per hour to the CEB grid on a daily basis and is to operate for approximately 335 days per year for 20 years.

Following in the footsteps of Western Power Co Ltd., two other companies have won approval for similar projects: the Fairway Project in Karadiyana which is set to process 500 metric tons of waste and a second project in Muthurajwela by a Korean firm to process 630 metric tons a day. The former will treat waste from the South of Colombo and the latter waste of the Gampaha District.

In years to come, the faraway problem that prompted these waste-to-energy plants will no longer be remembered simply because there will be no sign of it, not in your backyard and not in anyone else’s backyard either. People may or may not remember but right now it must be mentioned that it took an energetic, innovative and public-spirited team of people to bring down a mountain.