Pakistan throws away two fortunes every day: the food scraps and dung that could cook its dinners, and the crop stubble and city garbage that could power its grid. What is missing is a policy that puts each to work.

Every winter it happens again. The pressure in the household mains drops to a whisper, breakfast cooks on a dying flame, and the government rushes to divert imported gas, three times the price of our own, into subsidised stoves that will never cover the bill. By early 2026 the gas sector’s circular debt had reached about Rs 3.44 trillion, a figure the IMF now wants the two utilities to write off as the loss it obviously is. We buy expensive molecules, sell them cheap, and call the gap a subsidy. It is not a subsidy. It is a company going broke in slow motion.

Raising tariffs, going after gas theft, blending a single national price: all of it is needed and none of it is enough. These measures manage the shortage without ending it. And while we argue over them, the answer is sitting in our cattle sheds, our kitchens, our fields and our rubbish heaps.

Our waste-to-energy debate keeps missing one point: waste is not one thing, and pushing all of it toward a single solution is the mistake. It comes in two kinds, each with its own best use. The wet, rotting sort, meaning food waste, kitchen scraps, animal dung and the soggy organic part of household garbage, is perfect for anaerobic digestion, where bacteria in sealed tanks break it down into biogas, a methane-rich fuel you can cook on, or clean up and send down a pipe. The dry, fibrous sort, meaning crop residue like rice straw and cotton stalk, along with whatever is left of city garbage once the wet fraction is removed, digests poorly but burns well, and does far more good in a combustion or gasification plant that makes electricity. Moisture is what decides. Send each waste to the process that suits it and you get far more out of it than by dumping or burning it.

Start with the wet stream, because it goes straight to the heart of the gas problem. In one recent year Pakistan’s livestock produced an estimated 417 million tons of manure, more than half of it in Punjab. Add a fast-growing city’s food waste and the number turns........

© The Friday Times