Plastics maker Sintex seeks to solve India's energy and
sanitation problems in one stroke - with an at-home bio-gas digester.
(Fortune Magazine) -- Sintex
Industries, a plastics and textiles manufacturer in Gujarat, India, is betting
it can find profit in human waste. Its new biogas digester turns human
excrement, cow dung, or kitchen garbage into fuel that can be used for cooking
or generating electricity, simultaneously addressing two of India's major
needs: energy and sanitation.
Sintex's digester uses bacteria
to break down waste into sludge, much like a septic tank. In the process, the
bacteria emit gases, mostly methane. But instead of being vented into the air,
they are piped into a storage canister.
A one-cubic-meter digester,
primed with cow dung to provide bacteria, can convert the waste generated by a
four-person family into enough gas to cook all its meals and provide sludge for
fertilizer. A model this size costs about $425 but will pay for itself in
energy savings in less than two years. That's still a high price for most
Indians, even though the government recently agreed to subsidize about a third
of the cost for these family-sized units. "We want to create a new industry
for portable sanitation in India that's not available now," says S.B.
Dangayach, Sintex's managing director.
Government officials plan to end
open defecation by 2012 (hundreds of millions of Indians use railroad tracks or
other outdoor locales instead of toilets) and say biogas plants are part of the
solution. A.R. Shukla, a scientific advisor in the Ministry of New and
Renewable Energy, says India could support 12 million such plants, but only 3.9
million - mostly pricier models big enough to accommodate entire villages -
have been installed to date. And last year the government fell far short of its
target for new installations.
The future can be glimpsed on a
dusty, rutted road in a poor South Delhi neighborhood. Here 1,000 people use an
immaculately clean public toilet constructed by a nonprofit foundation, the
Sulabh Sanitation Movement. The biogas digester attached to toilets provides
cooking gas for a 600-student school and vocational-training program the
foundation runs. In the past, nongovernmental organizations like Sulabh were
the only ones offering biogas digesters.
But Sintex is hoping cities, real
estate developers, building managers, and hospitals will jump at a ready-made
way to harness the same energy.
Biogas digesters are just a small
fraction of Sintex's business. The company has installed only about 100 of
them. But it plans to increase investment and production tenfold in the coming
year. That growth potential has helped Sintex stock more than double this past
year. Human waste may be a stinky business, but to investors it smells like
money
