Corporation to produce fuel from plastics

According to a Chennai Corporation official, a plant would be constructed in Sholinganallur to process the plastic waste collected from Teynampet, Kodambakkam, Valasaravakkam, Alandur, Adyar, Perungudi and Sholinganallur zones. The second plant would come at Madhavaram, which would process plastic waste from Tiruvottiyur, Manali, Madhavaram, Tondiarpet, Royapuram, Tiru Vi Ka Nagar, Ambattur and Anna Nagar zones.

“The plants will be built under a private-public partnership model. Once the plants come into operation, we can produce transportation oil by processing plastic waste, which is non-recyclable,” the official said.

It is learnt that the civic body would heat the plastic waste in the absence of oxygen to produce a mixture of oil similar to crude oil. The oil would be further refined into transportation fuel.

As per Chennai Corporation data, the civic body has seized more than 311 tonnes of single-time-use plastic items from city shops from January 2019 to December 2019 and collected more than Rs 1 Crore as penalty from shop owners. These plastic items will be used to produce fuel. Apart from this, plastic waste collected from biomining of landfills and segregated at material recovery centres will also be processed at the proposed plants.

The Chennai Corporation has also invited cement factories to take dry waste such as rubber, leather, wood, clothes and others to use as fuel for five years. Also, the civic body had alreadysanctioned Rs 95.30 crore to set up incineration plants to process non-recyclable dry waste in as many as 10 places with a total processing capacity of 100 tonnes per day.