So sweet! Maharashtra’s green link to Wimbledon

What links the world’s oldest tennis tournament, Wimbledon, to the sugar factories in Satara district of Maharashtra? Compressed natural gas (CNG) – produced from these sugar mills’ waste and being used by a factory that manufactures tennis nets.

Updated on: Oct 29, 2013, 07:19:07 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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What links the world’s oldest tennis tournament, Wimbledon, to the sugar factories in Satara district of Maharashtra?

Compressed natural gas (CNG) – produced from these sugar mills’ waste and being used by a factory that manufactures tennis nets.

These tennis nets reached London before the start of the grand slam this year.

The CNG is being produced by the country’s first and biggest biogas digester at Satara, 100km south of Pune.

The digester was set up under Indo-German Development Partnership in 2012 and runs on spent wash (waste fluid) from sugar factories of a local cooperative.

A 1.14km-long pipeline brings the waste from sugar factories to the bio-digester.

“We provide the waste to be used as fuel, and in return, get biogas to run our sugar factories,” said Mohan Bonsale, chairman of Kisan Veer Satar Shakari Karkhana Limited, a sugar cooperative of about 46,000 farmers in the region.

“The cooperative saves Rs 1 crore every year on treating the waste fuel and also gets assured biogas supply to run the sugar factories.”

About 20% of the total gas generated goes back to sugar factories while the remaining 80% is converted into CNG for sale to the nearby factories.

“One of the factories we provide CNG to produces tennis nets for tournaments, including Wimbledon,” said Felix-Michael Weber, managing director of Green Elephant, the company which set up the biogas digester.

Weber had started Green Elephant in 2008 to generate energy from waste.

The company has also set up small plants under the Pune municipal corporation to generate electricity from municipal waste.

The Satara plant generates gas equivalent to 2.6 megawatts of electricity in a day, which means it saves nearby factories from using 11,000 litres of polluting diesel as fuel.

“As of now, the CNG is bottled and sold to the factories. We have technology to inject the gas directly into pipelines for supply to CNG stations and as cooking gas to homes,” Weber said.

The collaboration also implements the zero-waste concept in agriculture, wherein unproductive use of waste results in a loss of around Rs 50,000 every year.

The plant has an inbuilt mechanism to convert the end waste into bio-fertilizers, which are sold back to sugar farmers.

This benefits both the farmers’ cooperative and the company.

The company’s income increases with rise in CNG prices as the price of the spent fuel is constant.

The project was financed by the Indian Renewable Energy Development Agency Limited.

The author’s visit to the factory was paid for by the German Embassy, New Delhi.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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