This news should gladden the hearts of Puneites hassled by garbage in every nook and corner of the city. The Model Colony ward of the Pune Municipal Corporation has set up the city’s first civic biogas plant, which will generate enough energy to light up around 70 streetlights for seven hours a day and save Rs 5 lakh for the civic body every year. And, the input will be five tonnes of wet garbage collected from within the ward.

The PMC has commissioned Enprotech Solutions for the project. While the project was kicked off on Friday, it will take another month to actually generate energy. The civic body has used the bio-methanisation technique developed by the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre for the purpose.

BJP Corporator Jyotsna Sardeshpande said, “After checking out a similar project at a Mumbai housing complex, we decided to execute it in our ward. And it took a whole year to actually start it.”

The Model Colony (Ward 34) houses about 4,000 properties and the daily garbage comes to around eight tonnes. Of this, nearly half the portion falls under the category of wet garbage, and hence is biodegradable.

“While collecting garbage from people, it will be segregated as dry and wet and it will undergo further segregation at the ramp. The wet garbage would be put into a crusher and then to the digester. After further procedures, we would finally get two components: biogas and slurry, which could later be used as manure,” Enprotech Solutions director Sanjay Nandre said.

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