Innovation

Dealing with garbage is the most complex problem countries face today. Goa as a state level with a floating population of 70-80 lakh, produces annual wastage of 2-3 lakh tonne, Agarwal says. After partnering with a friend in Singapore who was into waste management, his company has started getting technology that not only manages waste but transforms it into multiple sources of energy – thermal and electrical. The complete output turns out to be fertilizers – dry and liquid.

“The entire waste which was a menace has been taken care of through carbon neutral energy,” he said. The company’s MBT has a technology that auto segregates all the garbage that reaches its collection centre into different sectors like glass, plastic, metal, paper, etc. The plant is able to produce gas which usually takes three to four weeks to produce in just 2 weeks.

Another product Is helping mange food waste at a restaurant level. “On a daily basis, a 5-star hotel or any property with above 120 rooms does wastage of 100-200 kgs of food,” he said. Advaitaa’s technology converts food waste into water since 95% of the food waste is liquid. They are working with a division of the Singapore government currently, since 40% of the country’s water comes from their treated sewage water.

Their next product moisture irrigation helps save water. “Currently, the best tech is drip irrigation. We went one step further to get a technology called sub-surface irrigation. That is nano technology applied to irrigation,” he said. A 1 square cm of tube contains over 1 lakh holes. This is installed in the earth. In 24 hours, it uses only 5 litres of water in area of 1 sq. metre leading to massive saving of water with no power or labour requirement.

Inspiration

For Agarwal, the inspiration to start the company was simple – make a larger impact on society. “If a company is making a huge impact or profit, we should channelize it back to the society,” he says. Having been associated with like-minded people across the globe, the idea stayed. “Most of our partners outside the country follow UN SDG’s goal strictly and align with it,” he said. In Goa, since a majority of industries is pharma and steel, top companies are usually aware about building a sustainable company, however, the idea doesn’t usually trickle down to its bottom most department. Agarwal wanted to take this a step ahead and build a company that not only build products for the environment but also build CSR activity as major division.

India has a huge market for fertilizer and waste management due to the agricultural diversity and huge amount of waste we produce. Keeping in mind the United Nations, Sustainable Development Goal -12, Advaitaa Green Energy brought forward its schemes and technologies like, Mechanical Biological Treatment, moisture irrigation, waste water and food treatment etc. “Before we went for this technology, we saw various plants in Delhi and tried to understand why they failed. There was this unit where bio gas was generated, where they would put entire carcasses of cows, and the system would get choked for days. We, at Advaitaa, classify all different waste materials that are auto segregated in our plant. We use shredders and horizontal screw press technology with 3 different chambers. The screw pushes in the waste so that the plant doesn’t get choked,” Mudit said, talking about the thought behind the company.

Overall impact

On asking about how the organization has been perceived so far in India and in Goa, Mudit brought forward some of the challenges that the company has faced so far. Admitting to a substantial yet slow impact, he said, “It’s been very slow in India for all these technologies due to various reasons. Some of them being, the unwillingness of the people to invest in a still emerging technology and the levels of bureaucracy one has to take care of. Goa has been comparatively easier to work with but we have shifted focus outside India now. The main reason we looked at India was due to the emotional attachment we all had. With each of these technologies, when we have investors ready, some or the other issue would pop up. Convincing the people who are used to subsidy is tough as they don’t want to buy an expensive product. Life of product is 5 years, here capital invested is high, and that you recover within one year. But people are not used to that.”

Business benefit

His initial motive was to cater specifically just in the Indian market. Agarwal feels, India as a country especially needs more work. “All the technology that we have is not picking up in India. There are plenty of reasons for that. Any green technology saves water, gas, and power, all three are which subsidised heavily in India,” he says. Therefore, the ROI is less. This usually discourages businesses in the clean energy space to take up Indian projects unless they are provided a topping fee by the government to help the companions finance the additional cost incurred while managing the waste. “The ROI received in Sri Lanka and Singapore takes 3-4 years. In India, it’s 8-9 years,” he said.

Citing the company’s future plans he said, “We would love to bring more of this to India. We are looking for investors wanting to focus in these projects. We are currently focused on Singapore as majority of waste is converted to fertilizer. But where will fertilizer be used in Singapore? So, we have partnered with a company in Australia who are going to purchase it for a month. It is going to be hybrid model – organic waste through anaerobic digestion and rest of the material through incineration. If this works out, we’ll look at 2-3 locations in Australia and countries which are already using this technology.”

Social and environmental benefit

The ecosystem in India is not yet completely perceptible and ready for such technology according to him, citing an example of abroad, he said, “This could have had a major market in the industrial sector. A similar program was run in Abu Dhabi and that did extremely well mainly due to the amount of investors. India has a hug market for fertilizers and we need government interference to educate people about waste management and its advantages.”

“The amount of gas we produced takes three to four weeks but we are able to produce that in 2 weeks by using high amount of pressure and abridger and thermophilic bacteria which can survive in those temperatures. That’s where the difference between us and a lot of our competitors comes from,” he said, when asked about what makes Advaitaa different. Talking about the overall impact that waste management has on the environment, he told us about how this is the need of the hour. We as a country produce a lot of disposable as well as non-disposable kind of waste. This waste usually takes up a lot of land space and also harms the environment. Advaitaa Green Energy helps us tackle this by addressing two of our most important and persistent problems, waste and energy.

Sources :http://advaitaa.in/green_energy/company.html

Interview

Mudit Agarwal, Managing DIrector