Bhubaneswar: The East Coast Railway (ECoR), headquartered in Bhubaneswar in Odisha, on Wednesday created history by becoming the first Government agency in the country to commission a state-of-the-art waste-to-energy plant at the Mancheswar Carriage Repair Workshop here.
The plant, a patented technology called Polycrack, in Indian Railways and the first in the Government sector and fourth in the country.
The first plant was a small one that was set up by Infosys at Bangalore in 2011 while the second one was at Moti Bagh in Delhi in 2014 with a capacity of 50kg per day/batch each. The third one was set up at Hindalco in 2019 with 50kg capacity per batch.
It is world’s first patented heterogenous catalytic process which converts multiple feed stocks into hydrocarbon liquid fuels, gas, carbon and water. Earlier, lots of non-ferrous scrap generated from the Carriage Repair Workshop had no efficient method of disposal. As a result, these elements were being disposed by landfills, which had environmentally hazardous impact.
Polycrack Plant can be fed with all types of plastic, petroleum sludge, un-segregated MSW (Municipal Solid Waste) with moisture up to 50 per cent, e–waste, automobile fluff, organic waste, including bamboo’s, garden waste., and Jathropa fruit and palm bunch.
Constructed in just three months at a cost of around 2 crore, waste generated from Mancheswar Carriage Repair Workshop, coaching cepot and Bhubaneswar railway station will be feeder material for this plant. The plant will access 500 KG waste materials per day.
The facility was inaugurated by Railway Board Member (Rolling Stock) Rajesh Agarwal in the presence of East Coast Railway (ECoR) General Manager Vidya Bhushan and Additional GM Sudhir Kumar on Wednesday evening.
