India Climate Solutions

Auroville is a “project in human unity”, an international community based just over the Pondicherry border in Northern Tamil Nadu. The once barren landscape is now lush and green thanks to the tree planting efforts of the first inhabitants and is home to over 1800 people from India and 35 other countries. The residents are involved in a range of activities including a cashless economy, environmental regeneration, organic farming , appropriate building technology and renewable energy.

I thought that Auroville would be the mecca of environmental awareness but that’s certainly not the case when it comes to waste management. Their visitors centre is over run by hordes of tourists every day yet the three recycling bins that they have are just used as general garbage bins.

Their environmental displays don’t mention anything about the way their waste is managed and the guide leaflet and map doesn’t list it’s Eco-service. There is rubbish everywhere and the surrounding Tamil villages are clogged with garbage. I should have known really as the waste management page on the website hasn’t been updated since 2003 when bullock carts where used to collect people’s rubbish.

We were able to visit the Eco-Service and Rajamanikkam and his colleagues were very helpful and obviously working hard.

At Azeotropy 2010, IIT Bombay's fest held in early March, students will be competing on effective Life Cycle Assessment - the analysis of the energy and resources used in the complete life cycle of a product or system. It will be an amazing learning for hundreds of students, to understand more about the power fo Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as a tool for evaluating true sustainability. As the organizers say, "By this competition, we aim to encourage the use of LCA as a tool for corporate decisions as well as governmental policy-making in India."

The exact challenge is: "You have to carry out a Life Cycle Assessment of the "Production of ammonium nitrate from Natural gas" to calculate the total energy consumption of the process and make a poster for the same. System Boundaries are from Cradle to gate i.e. from raw material production to factory gate, and does not include the impacts of further supply chain or distribution mechanism. You have to estimate "energy consumption per unit production" that have incurred (directly or indirectly) during the process.