Converting Garbage Into Gas

Through plasma gasification technology.

- T. Rajagopalan

Whoever says that Hyderabad is a clean city he or she is entirely wrong. Right in the heart of this historic city garbage is piled up at the Ashoknagar cross roads next to NTR Stadium that is at the height of a hillock. This is burnt (incinerated) and the smoke that comes out is toxic and causes air pollution. The citizens of this city seem to have become inured to this smoke as also diesel fumes, lead and nitrous oxide poisoning. These are in addition to the litany of risks they confront in their quotidian life. But dioxins belong to another level of threat altogether.

The word is a generic term for upwards a hundred longlasting chemicals that emanate by burning municipal and medical waste and also by a handful of industrial processes. Dioxins are insoluble in water and when they settle on land and water bodies they are absorbed in their entirety by terrestrial and acquatic vegetation. They move up the food chain into animals and fish that feed on plants and eventually into human bodies. For the reason living organism cannot metabolise them they are found in high concentration in meat, fish, milk and eggs. In humans a protracted exposure to dioxins impairs the functioning of liver and the reproductive system, causing cancer. In totality dioxins renders one’s life short. Woman may in all probability pass them to foetuse in their wombs or breastfeeding their babies.