Waste management

Auroville Eco-Service

Waste management in Auroville caters to a relatively small population i.e. about 1,500 Aurovilian residents and their employees and visitors. The roughly 100 Auroville settlements are very much scattered, a point which has to be taken into consideration in the design and organisation of technical solutions.

Auroville's residents have been, and are being, educated about the need to separate various kinds of waste at source itself, at the site of waste generation, regardless of whether it is a household or an industry.

The Auroville Eco-Service is a waste collection team comprising an Aurovilian supervisor and two "rag-pickers" recruited from neighbouring villages. The rag-pickers have been equipped with a uniform and a card for identification and are responsible for collection in respective areas. They move around on tricycles and a bullock cart. If waste has been properly separated by the consumers in the various communities - basically into wet/organic/compostable waste and inorganic/non-compostable waste - households pay less towards the collection service.

Composting

Composting of all organic and compostable waste is strongly encouraged in the township, preferably in various different places, since the cost for transport of waste cannot be recovered by the market value of compost. Composting is happening in heaps and windrows i.e. by aerobic means, and in pits by anaerobic processes. Farms and some households also use other methods, for instance with the help of vermiculture, biodynamic preparations, or EM technology. (EM stands for effective micro-organisms, used in agriculture and in environmental sanitation.)

Incinerator

The waste collectors of the Auroville Eco-Service sort the non-compostable waste and bring everything re-usable and re-cyclable to the various traders in recyclable materials in the area. Whatever is not accepted by these traders is burned in an incinerator at the Auroville Health Centre.

The incinerator at the Health Centre has been designed in Auroville itself. It is far from a state of the art incinerator, but nevertheless reaches temperatures of 800 degrees Celsius, and hence is expected to control release of toxins to a great extent. Unfortunately the wear and tear of the daily incineration at high temperatures is too much for its brick structure, and Auroville Eco-Service has had to discontinue the use of this incinerator since October 2000. Provisional land-fill solutions are being undertaken until another incinerator can be built which can take care of larger volumes of combustible waste. It is hoped that this new facility can also be combined with an energy retrieval system from the combustion process.

Waste water treatment

As regards waste water and sewage treatment, the first solutions in Auroville were cheap: simple combinations of septic tank and soak pit. Since the population of Auroville is growing, and the density is expected to assume a more urban character, more appropriate solutions are now being sought after and tested. There are several waste water treatment plants of a generally fairly small size (from 2 to 200 users), most of them based on the technology of horizontal (or vertical) sand/gravel filter beds planted with reeds or other plants. Several biogas plants are in operation, and various combinations of primary and secondary sewage treatment are functional. At a few places, also EM technology has been introduced into the treatment systems so as to improve their performance.

For further information contact:  Auroville Eco-Service 

( stefano@auroville.org.in )

For the application of composting methods, vermiculture, biodynamic farming, EM technology - contact the AuroAnnam team. 

lucas@auroville.org.in or 

margarita@auroville.org.in