Alka Zadgaonkar wrings plastic waste for profit http://www.goodnewsindia.com/index.php/Magazine/story/alkaZ/
It is strange to hear Alka Zadgaonkar say, "Plastics are useful to our lives. We can't deny that." Were she a spokeswomen for the dishonest, self-serving plastic industry lobby, that statement would be understandable. Were she a legislator we could say she was evading the issue. Her statement will likely infuriate many of us agonising over the plastic litter all around us. But hold your breath. Alka loves plastics for an exciting reason; she is the inventor of a process that has the potential to clear our environment of plastic waste, create a million jobs in waste management, add useful, profitable products to our economy and make India a technology leader in taming plastics. Her work is breathtaking good news for this planet's environment. Pie on the table: We are not talking of a pie in the sky idea that is still in the laboratory. Alka and her husband Umesh, are buying in 5 tonnes of plastic waste everyday in Nagpur at prices attractive to rag pickers. They are wringing fuel oil out of that unsightly pile and selling it to industries in the Butibori Industrial Estate, on Wardha Road out of Nagpur. Production from their plant, Unique Plastic Waste Management & Research Co Pvt Ltd is sold out for the next year. They are making money right now, and are about to scale up and buy in 25 tonnes of plastic waste a day. That production too is booked. As Nagpur generates only 35 TPD of plastic waste, they will shortly run out of raw material to grow bigger. So, a plant based on their technology may soon be playing in your town, at a factory near you. All your questions: Too good to be true? Let us at once address some of the questions that are already popping up in your mind. Zadgaonkar's is not a demo plant running on some government grant or subsidy. They took a commercial loan from the State Bank of India in 2005 and have already begun paying back. In fact, the government let them down and Zadgaonkars decided to flex the great Indian entrepreneurial muscle. [On that, more later.] The process invented and patented by Alka Zadgaonkar is capable of accepting all tribes and castes of plastic waste as input: carry bags, broken buckets and chairs, PVC pipes, CDs, computer keyboards and other eWaste, the horrible, aluminized crinkly bags of the kind that pack crisps, expanded polystyrene [the abominable 'thermocole'], PET bottles- are these and others are all given equal opportunity to contribute to Zadgaonkars' profits. No sorting or picking is done. No preparatory cleaning is necessary either, except shredding that helps economic transport of bulky waste. All solids and metal fines settle down in the melting process or are converted to ash. Chlorinated plastics like PVC are particularly hazardous to burn because they emit dioxins. In the Alka Zadgaonkar process, the entire shredded mixture is melted at a low temperature and led to a de-gasification stage. Here chlorine is led away to harmlessly bubble through water, producing hydrochlorous acid. Process path: Shredded waste is continually fed into a conventional extruder. Here over the length of a heated extruder screw, the waste is plasticised and melted at a relatively low temperature. The melt is then stripped of chlorine as we just saw, and led to a reactor where lies the crux of the invention. The melt interacts with proprietory catalysts invented by Alka. The stable, continual chain of carbon found in all plastics is destabilised by a depolymerization reaction and rendered ready for a rich harvest. Three streams of produce are obtained. A part of the gaseous cloud is condensed to form a liquid hydrocarbon. This is the recovered fuel oil. It is a sulphur free equivalent of industrial crude. It can be readily used in furnaces or put through fractional condensation to obtaine finer grades like petrol. For a long while to come, the best market for this is as furnace oil for process heating in factories. Zadgaonkar recovery plants, when they spread in the country, can use plastic from local dumps and serve local industries which currently buy expensive furnace oil from far away. What is not condensable at the reactor is obtained as a LPG equivalent. A modified genset can generate electricity using this gas. This is now standard practice at a Zadgaonkar plant, which is self sufficient for power. The final remains are a solid fuel called petroleum coke. Approximately 70% is liquid hydrocarbon, 15% is gas and 5% is solid coke. Balance is ash and metal fines. And now the story: Alka born in 1962, has always had a fascination for organic chemistry. "I was intrigued by the way new products can be created by playing with carbon and hydrogen molecules," she says. "There was a sense of great control over things." That mind set was to eventually lead her to her invention. After marriage to Umesh Zadgaonkar, she settled in Nagpur and began teaching chemistry. Umesh is an MBA and a natural entrepreneur- which means he has an ability to grab the opportunity ball and carry it over the line, eluding all tackles. He was the first to bring health clubs and gyms to a sleepy, conservative Nagpur; he realised the idea would appeal to citizens given to living the clean life. In contrast, Alka is a small, self-effacing lady fiercely committed to teaching and housekeeping. Their son Akshay is a computer prodigy. In 1993, Alka first began to notice plastic piles in their clean and pleasant Nagpur. The menace was already a huge problem in big cities and there was a rising chorus of concern demanding solutions. These ranged from fiats to ban carry bags use [- as though other forms of plastics were innocent], to recycling to making the industry pay. "You can't wish away plastics," says Alka. "They have become a part of our lives." She began to think of a creative solution. It was still pre-Internet days and she did not have ready to access to the state of the art. She knew her chemistry, though. She began arguing that the source of all plastics is petroleum. The trick is to revert them to their previous life where they become petroleum again. Plastics get their variety and stability from strong continual, patterned bonding of the carbon molecule. If this long chain is disrupted, they would collapse and can be coaxed to their original form. The process of disruption is random depolymerization. Planning disruption: That is so simplistic that many technologists will react stating the many problems in the way. Alka was lucky she was sounding Umesh. He's a positive person who believes anything is possible. Ten years ago, when their son Akshay was just 8 and home computers were intimidating, expensive objects, everyone shooed the boy away from it. Not Umesh. That encouragement led Akshay to become at 12, the world's youngest Microsoft Certified Software Developer [MCSD]. The Zadgaonkar family was sent tickets to Seattle for a private meeting with Bill Gates. [Akshay, yet to finish college is interning with Microsoft at Hyderabad.] So Umesh understands dreamers. He urged Alka to explore her idea. "He believed in me and kept saying it was only a matter of time and labour," she says. Young Sunil Raisoni, who runs the Raisoni College where Alka teaches was another man who encouraged her. She got space and permission to set up a lab in the college. Zadgaonkars sold an apartment they had and set aside Rs. 1 Lakh for equipment. >From the beginning Alka was clear that any process she develops should be able to handle any manner of plastics, with little cleaning or preparation. She was setting herself a harder target in a territory without maps. Her idea was to get a plasticised pool of waste to react with her proprietory catalysts to create hydrocarbon fumes that can be condensed. She set up her experiment at Raisoni college and began trying various catalyst recipes. "I began with an awareness that it'd be a long series of exploration," she says. But she was not prepared for the length of that series. The temperature and pressure [-atmospheric] parameters were pretty much standardised; the only experimentation was with various catalysts. And yet, there was no sign of promise. Then came Carver: Three years into her experiments and with nothing to show, Alka was close to giving up. She began to doubt her ability. Umesh sensed the mood and brought home a Marathi book for her to read. It was 'Ek Hota Carver', a biography of George Washington Carver, the great black American inventor and idealist. Alka says,"That book shamed me. Here was a man who was black, denied parental love and racially discriminated. Yet he pursued knowledge that may benefit all and left his wealth for common good." Carver carried her over the last mile. She resumed her experiments with a new vigour. Then came the day, Dec 13, 1999. She had set up that morning's trial catalyst and was in a classroom teaching. A maintenance staff came rushing at 11 am and said cooking gas was leaking from her lab. "I knew at once that I had my winning catalyst. If there was gas, there would be a distillate too," she recalls. And there it was, a few milli litres of liquid petroleum recovered from plastic film waste. She sat down for a few moments to take it all in. And then she called Umesh. The inevitable hard journey then began. News of such a development naturally evokes both hyperbole and skepticism. Media picked up the story and all Nagpur was agog. Then on Sep 2, 2003, the Union petroleum ministry sent a team from Indian Oil Corporation's [IOC] R&D department. They were dedicated investigators. They sat all day in Alka's lab, even taking lunch there. They measured and noted everything, peered into corners and took away samples they produced with their own hands. Then at the invitation of the minister Ram Naik, another demo took place at IOC's Faridabad centre. Two more demos followed in Mumbai and Delhi. IOC then declared its findings in a report: "The products have been tested at IOC R&D and recommended possible end uses are as follows: For liquid hydrocarbon: agricultural pumps, DG sets, boiler fuel, marine bunker fuel, as input for petroleum refineries, fuel oil etc; For gas: any nearby industries using LPG, in-house consumption; For solid fuel: thermal power plants, metallurgical industries." The minister then declared a grant of Rs.6 crores for a pilot production plant to be set up by Zadgaonkars in collaboration with IOC. The freedom run: Only, the grant never materialized. Alka and Umesh wrote letters, reminders and called. Things stayed intriguingly silent. When they probed deeper they discovered that a senior science bureaucrat was angling for equity in the venture. Elsewhere, Alka's PhD guide was campaigning to be named co-inventor. Well, well what's new you say. Aren't these typical of India. Yes, odds are indeed stacked against those with novel ideas and spontaneous help seldom comes forth. But aren't heroes meant to be of sterner stuff? And if there weren't enough of them around GoodNewsIndia can't have run for over five years. A hero does suffer setbacks but they don't stop him. Nor does he make a display of his martyrdom. A hero vaults the odds or works around them. In 2004, Umesh, ever the entrepreneur, flushed the whole connection with IOC. He went over to the State Bank of India and presented a business plan. They were interested but would conduct their own trials on the idea. It was soon done and a team of senior bank staff arrived in Nagpur to grant a loan of Rs 5 crores. Alka's patent was treated as equity and pledged to the bank as security. In under six months the plant came up and in 2005 production began. The rest we know. Umesh is a busy man now, taking calls and meeting potential franchisees. A delegation of Chief Ministers from five states have visited to explore setting up plants in their states. A team from Netherlands is in dialogue to see if the produce can be mostly solid coke instead of liquid fuel. A team in IIT, Mumbai is designing automation features for standard 5 TPD units to be set up by franchisees. But these are early days still. For now, clients in Butibori Estate's industrial units are buying all that Unique can produce. The Bank has seen repayments begin. But at the Zadgaonkar household, values have hardly changed. Success sits lightly on this family of knowledge seekers: Alka refuses to give up her calling as a teacher. ______________ Prof [Mrs] Alka Zadgaonkar Head of the Dept.- Applied Chemistry, G H Raisoni College of Engineering, Nagpur - 440016 Phones: Home: [0712] 2220111; Mobile: 093701-20111 [Umesh Zadgaonkar]; email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] February, 2006 *~Jen Birmingham UK http://groups.yahoo.com/group/VascokarsUnited/ http://groups.yahoo.com/group/IEIGLC/ http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GoanStudentsAbroad/ ====================================================================== __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Goanet mailing list [email protected] http://lists.goanet.org/listinfo.cgi/goanet-goanet.org
