Renewlogy eyes cleanup of India's Ganges River

National Harbor, Md. — The Ganges River plays important spiritual, cultural and economic roles for millions of residents of India. The river is also one of the largest contributors of plastic waste into the world's waters.

But one company, a half a world away in Salt Lake City, is hoping to take steps to help alleviate that pollution problem.

Renewlogy is at the center of a project sponsored by the Alliance to End Plastic Waste that will place a mobile plastic waste-to-energy system along a tributary of the Ganges aimed at collecting used plastics and converting them into fuel.

The system is a scaled-down version of the company's pyrolysis equipment that CEO Priyanka Bakaya hopes will prove effective in capturing some of the waste that constantly enters the river and its tributaries.

The Ganges is one of 10 rivers in Asia and Africa that deliver some 90 percent of the plastic pollution to the world's oceans.

She hopes that proving the viability of a small-scale pyrolysis system eventually will lead to placement of additional units in other parts of India and the world to help tackle the problem.

While Bakaya's expertise is in making fuel from old plastics, she said that can only be one part of any solution. So the project is also working to establish a program that will include education, physical barriers and reverse vending machines to help divert plastic from waterways and create value for consumers.

The Alliance, unveiled with great fanfare earlier this year, is a consortium of companies that have come together to pledge $1.5 billion to help end plastic waste. The group includes a variety of chemical and plastics makers as well as Berry Global Group Inc. on the processing end.

Part of that effort is supporting Renewlogy in its efforts in India.

Bakaya was born in India but raised in Australia. She's traveled back to India many times to visit relatives and has seen first-hand the challenges of cleaning up the Ganges.

Even to Bakaya, the idea of stationing small-scale pyrolysis units in plastic pollution hot spots around the world seemed a bit crazy not that long ago, she said during an interview at the recent Plastics Recycling Conference in National Harbor.

But the CEO, who has been working in the pyrolysis field for years and has seen the increased focus on finding a solution for ocean plastics. She called it a tipping point.

"I've always been thinking in the back of my mind that it would really be great to find a way to take this back to those regions that need the technology the most," she said.

"We're really starting from ground zero. I feel there's a lot of work that needs to be done, all of the challenges that are ahead of us. Also, the opportunities as well," she said.

"If we really can find something that works in one community and is effective, then we can look to have a scale across more communities in India and then also along other parts of the region in Southeast Asia," she said.

For this year, the project, will focus on establishing roots, piloting ideas and collecting data about what works. The biggest challenge, she said, is gaining regulatory approval in India to operate the small-scale unit that will transform the plastics to fuels.

"Let's see. Let's just start small," she said. "If we don't try, we will never know."

Residents along the Ganges often rely on the river for waste disposal, so another idea Bakaya has as part of the project is to create fences along the waterway to capture debris before it reaches the ocean.

Plastics pollution, she said, "has really become a defining problem of our time."