The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has announced plans to set up two plants at the Mulund dumping ground to convert plastic waste into oil or pellets. The move comes as part of the corporation’s efforts to process the 70 lakh tonnes of waste at the site, of which only 20.27 lakh tonnes have been processed in the past two years.
The project to process the waste at Mulund was awarded in 2018 for six years, but it only began in 2021 after the contractor received the necessary permissions and procured machinery. During the processing of the waste, over 2 lakh tonnes of scrap combustible fractions (SCF), such as plastic, fibre, and wood, were obtained. While the BMC has given 15,000 tonnes of SCF to the plastic processing industry to convert into granules or oil, the newly established plants will process the remaining waste.
One of the plants will be a Refuse Derived Fuel (RDF) unit that can process 200 tonnes of SCF per day to convert it into pellets. The pellets can serve as a substitute for fossil fuels in industries such as cement plants. The other plant will use pyrolysis to process 20 tonnes of plastic waste per day into solid, liquid, and gaseous fuels.
Despite the BMC’s discussions with cement and power industries to accept the end products, a limited number of cement industries are currently accepting SCF recovered from dump sites.
A BMC official stated that they have been looking for various solutions to process the waste, and the plants are a significant step towards achieving their goal. With these new plants in place, the BMC hopes to significantly contribute to reducing plastic waste and help create a cleaner and healthier environment for Mumbai’s citizens.
