LAHORE: The City District Government, Lahore, has abandoned work on first-of-its-kind Refuse Derived Fuel (RDF) plant in the provincial capital as the majority of foreign investors have left the country due to the current wave of terrorism.

Sources said the project, which was devised one-and-a-half years back, was one of the CDGL’s mega projects and its estimated cost was Rs 300 million. At its start, the authorities had claimed that the plant would end the mess of solid waste from the city besides generating heavy revenue for the government. They said the government would earn the revenue by selling the RDF to cement factories.

They said the RDF was used as a supplementary fuel or power generation fuel at cement plants in Europe and other modern countries and it had replaced coal as fuel, especially in the cement sector.

A senior CDGL official said the RDF was produced by shredding municipal solid waste (MSW) in an autoclave and consisted largely of organic components of municipal waste such as plastics and biodegradable waste. He said the RDF plants were environment-friendly, designed to reduce the hazardous effects of solid waste from a locality.

Sources said the CDGL’s mega project faced the first blow some six months back when the Punjab Local Government Department stopped the city district government from launching the RDF project on its own. Sources said the department claimed that the CDGL did not have enough capacity and expertise to launch such a mega project. However, about a month back the Punjab government allowed all the five CDGLs to launch the RDF projects on their own. The sources said the CDG of Gujranwala had already advertised the project while city district governments of Rawalpindi, Multan and Faisalabad were in the process of finalising the details of their respective RDF projects.