It takes hundreds of years to decompose and yet it is difficult to imagine life without it. Some people have even copied us. Then they tried with a pressure cooker.“It was anyway on our minds to do something about plastic though we didn’t know what,” says Medha. And then the ice cube incident happened and pushed the two of them into the kitchen to experiment. But Rudra is in no hurry. In a little over a year, four tonnes of plastic was collected from Thane and Dombivli near Mumbai, and 3.”Rudra started operations four years ago and today has recycled 22 tonnes of plastic from 15,000 households in Pune.”So, why hasn’t Rudra offered its services to the Pune Municipal Corporation that generates 1,600 tonnes of garbage daily, seven to eight per cent of that being plastic?“Well, the PMC recycles about 60 per cent of the plastic and 40 per cent goes into landfills.Plastic is the bane of our modernised world. Dr Medha Tadpatrikar, partner, Rudra, tells us how they create fuel from waste plastic.
They met several petrochemical engineers to learn what plastic was and how it was derived. Some of this fuel is sold to villages around Pune. There is also some sulphur oxide (SOX) and nitrogen oxide (NOX) but these are in extremely small quantities compared to traditional fuel burning methods.8 ppm. Rudra Environmental Solutions, a young company based out of Pune, had the audacity to think of converting this non-degradable material into fuel. “We are a social enterprise and I feel it is more important that we do good than that we make money.The possibilities are huge, as Medha points out: “The world has about eight billion tonnes of plastic dumped in landfills or the ocean.”A friend who was invited to this experiment told them that the smell emanating from the cooker was that of methane. When we lit this it burned.4 tonnes from Baramati. Rudra cannot be everywhere, right? So let people take our design, let them reduce pollution and shrink the landfills. So he took out one cube and placed it on a plate.It all started with a cube of melting ice. The processing plant China plastic blow moulding machine Rudra Environmental Solutions are all set to make good use of the eight billion tonnes of plastic waste the world dumped in landfills and oceans to generatepolyfuel. Some of the societies that contribute their plastic find this a cheaper alternative than diesel to fire their generators. But that makes me happy. Some of the fuel generated with their experiment has been sold to villages around Pune for Rs 35-Rs 37 a litre.
