BARC scientists convert dry sewage sludge to Bio-Gold
The technology has a potential to resolve health and environmental issues related to sewage sludge produced at sewage treatment plants
Chennai: Radiation technology will be extensively used for ‘Hygienisation of Dry Sewage Sludge’ produced at various sewage treatment plants in Chennai. The technology treats sludge to make it pathogen-free organic manure that is useful for various agricultural applications.
Ahmedabad is the first city in the country adopting this technology. If every thing goes according to plan, Chennai would soon follow its footsteps.
Nuclear scientists in Radiation Technology Development Division headed by Lalit Varshney at Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), Mumbai, have been working on the sewage sludge hygienisation technology for the past two decades and now they have found an innovative process which is scalable, reliable and economical for treating large quantities of sewage sludge.
Today, all major cities in the country are facing the perennial problems associated with treatment and safe disposal of sewage waste. “Now, the BARC technology has the potential to change the face of entire system and is also eco-friendly” according to Lalit Varshney.
The Gujarat Government has already got into business and laid the foundation stone for setting-up of centralised irradiation plant of dry sludge hygienisation project with a capacity of treating 100 tonnes of dry sludge per day.
“One such facility in Chennai is enough to solve all our problems related to dry sewage sludge”, J. Daniel Chellappa, Senior Scientist, Technical Coordination Wing, BARC, Chennai told Deccan Chronicle. For instance, most of the important waterways in Chennai, such as Cooum, Adyar and Buckingham canal are filled with sewage wastes.
The conventional sewage treatment plants (STPs) effectively treat the liquid part of sewage, but hygenising the solid component of the sewage, where microbial load is maximum, is posing a major challenge for its safe and scientific disposal, he said.
Explaining how this pioneering technology works, Chellappa said the solid waste content in sewage is less than 0.1%, and the rest is liquid. The innovative BARC technology targets this 0.1% dry waste, which actually is the feed for all dreaded pathogens and also breeding ground for the disease-carriers.
“The dried sludge from the conventional STPs can be transported to he centralised irradiation plant where all harmful pathogens can be inactivated while keeping intact the useful organic matter and nutrients. What we are proposing is a fully automatic irradiation plant that will produce pathogen-free carbon-rich organic manure from the dry sludge.
Scientists at Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR) have already established that using organic manure produced using BARC technology for cultivation leads to high crop yield. The manure can supplement chemical fertilisers and save government subsidy on urea”, Varshney explains.