Nov. 7: A Mumbai-based firm has offered the Pollution Control Board, Assam (PCBA) a new technology to convert the city’s plastic wastes into a fuel equivalent to petrol.

A team of scientists from the firm, Oilfied Tekniks, today gave a demonstration of its new and innovative technology to turn waste plastic into fuel using catalytic conversion method on the premises of the PCBA office at Bamunimaidam.

The initiative holds significance in view of the difficulties being faced by the city in the disposal of plastic waste. Unabated dumping of plastic has clogged the city’s drains and natural drainage channels, leading to waterlogging during the rainy season.

Technical consultant of Oilfied Tekniks, Ravi Verma, said the company has offered its technology to the PCBA and that the proposal was under consideration of the board.

Elaborating on the technology, Verma said the waste plastic is heated to the reaction temperature — 350 to 450 degrees Celsius — in a particular vessel in the presence of a catalyst. “At this temperature, the plastic starts degrading into lower molecular weight monomers. They then recombine to form petroleum vapours with different chains of hydrocarbons. The vapours are condensed to form fuel,” he said.

Verma said the catalyst helps convert plastic into either liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) or a liquid fuel similar to petrol. “Generally the fuel thus produced has a low sulphur content as compared to distillate fuels. Moreover, the residue can also be used as coke fuel.”

Verma said the technology, christened P2P (plastic to petrol), can produce about 1.2 litres of fuel with an octane count between 89 to 92 from 1 kg of plastic.

The octane count of high-grade petrol is 91.

Nitin Bondal, a senior representative of the company, said they were implementing a project using this technology in Dubai.

“This technology can convert all kinds of plastics, including floppy discs, CDs and plastic bottles into fuel,” he said, adding that the machine developed by them could process 25 tonnes of plastic every day.

PCBA chairman J.L. Dutta said unless economic methods for the disposal of plastic wastes was adopted, it would lead to soil degradation, a dip in the water table and many other problems.

He said plastic wastes could also be used in macadamising the roads.

According to a rough estimate, the city generates 300 metric tonnes of garbage, of which about 5 metric tonnes is plastic wastes.