As a part of a pilot project, from the past one month three restaurants in Bengaluru have been using compressed biogas (CBG) produced from wet waste generated by 80 restaurants in north Bengaluru.
While Konark Residency on Residency Road and Konark Kanteerava on Kasturba Road rely completely on CBG using 85 kg and 50 kg a day respectively, the third restaurant, Adiga Residency, has substantially replaced liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) with CBG in its kitchen.
Maltose Agri Pvt. Ltd. picks up wet waste from restaurants, processes it into slurry and sells the organic manure. And, Carbon Masters India Pvt. Ltd., a UK-based carbon management company, bottles the CBG generated from the waste at its Doddaballapur plant, and supplies it to the restaurants.
The company’s bottling plant in Doddaballapur is working at full capacity at present bottling 250 kg of CBG each day from 200 tonnes of wet waste. Leftover gas is stored (another feature where CBG scores over solar energy) for use in ‘green events’ such as weddings.
K. Ramamurthy, Managing Director, Konark Group of Hotels, and Secretary of the Bruhat Bangalore Hoteliers’ Association (BBHA), whose two restaurants on Residency Road and Kasturba Road now use only CBG, said wet waste is collected from his restaurants by the company that supplies CBG at the same price as LPG.
He said that the greatest advantage with CBG is that it can be used till the last gram unlike LPG. However, storing the cylinders requires space as they are bulky. An 11-kg CBG cylinder is double the height of LPG cylinders, and requires a chain and pulley to move it.
Sriram Adiga, owner and Managing Director of Adiga Hotels Pvt. Ltd., uses 35 kg of biogas to supplement the 20 kg of LPG in the kitchen of Adiga Residency.
With the pilot project clicking with restaurateurs, BBHA is likely to recommend its 1,300 members to use CBG.
Som Narayan, Managing Director, Carbon Masters India Pvt. Ltd., said at least 1,000 restaurants, each with 50 kg of wet waste, will have to join in to get the project going full scale. He said, “The falling LPG prices are a big challenge to us. Getting more restaurants to use the gas is critical for us”.
