NITW: Doing its bit for Swachh Bharat

Warangal: In a major push for the Swachh Bharat Mission, the National Institute of Technology, Warangal, (NITW), has come up with a bio-digester that uses bio-methanation technology to produce biogas and bio-manure to make use of solid organic waste generated on its campus.

As part of environmental management plan, the NITW Director Prof N V Ramana Rao has on Monday inaugurated the Bio-digester set up with the grants of TEQIP-III as part of environmental management plan.

Rao said that biomethanation is an attractive technology among the biological methods since it generates biogas comprising mainly methane and carbon dioxide. Methane in biogas can be used as fuel for thermal applications or it can be converted into electricity.

The biogas obtained from the plant is connected to the hostel kitchen (Mess-1 &2 ). The digestate/slurry from biomethanation plant has high nutritive value and it can be used as manure for maintaining plants in the campus.

The kitchen/ food waste has high carbohydrate, proteins and high moisture content and thus is a good substrate for the production of biogas through biomethanation process.

Biomethanation process also reduces the load of organic pollutants in terms of reduction of TS, VS, BOD and COD. Thus, biomethanation is an eco-friendly technology for the treatment of solid waste organic waste, he said.

It's learnt that the plant has provisions for collecting the samples from different depths of the reactor making it suitable for conducting advanced research in the area of sustainable organic waste management. It is also proposed to establish the composting of vegetative matter produced in the campus.

The digestate produced from the biogas plant will be utilised to enhance the composting process and will be studied technically for further scaling up. The established biogas plant will also help the research scholars to pursue the state of art research in the area of waste management and energy integration.