Waste to Greenery
Why in News:
- The Taipei Economic and Culture Center (TECC) in India has shared its willingness to work with India in promoting green energy, organic circular economy industry, and create a bridge between India and Taiwan’s technology.
What is a Circular Economy
- Recently, the concept of a circular economy has gained traction as a solution that would ameliorate the burden on natural resources while still encouraging economic growth. The concept is simple: minimize the disposal of waste and the need for raw materials by keeping existing materials and assets in the production cycle. This alternative economic system transforms our current linear economy, which “takes, makes and wastes” into one that reuses, recycles and repairs.
- An advanced circular economy model has been adopted by systematic design to keep products with recyclable features, enhance resource utilization, eliminate waste, avoid pollution of the natural environment, and achieve the principles of 3Rs (Reduce, Recycle and Reuse). Among them, the cycle in a circular economy, uses agricultural wastes as biomass raw materials, which are converted into value-added and environmentally beneficial renewable energy or bio-chemicals through bio-refinery technologies.
- Besides increasing farmers’ income, it can also fundamentally solve the environmental pollution caused by the burning of agricultural wastes. Large corporations, foundations and local governments have gotten behind the CE as the new way forward. But given that most of urban growth will take place in less developed countries, their rapidly urbanizing cities need to be included, and even prioritized.
Traditional Model- Take- make- waste model
- A linear economy traditionally follows the “take-make-dispose” step-by-step plan. This means that raw materials are collected, then transformed into products that are used until they are finally discarded as waste. Value is created in this economic system by producing and selling as many products as possible.
How Taiwan can help India with tech transfer
- Rice straw to create alternative fuels such as bio-ethanol or briquette is used to generate bio-power as a syngas instead of natural gas. They do not produce air pollutants like PM2.5 and simultaneously solve the problems of agricultural wastes and air pollution.
- Residue and slurry from biogas production can be used as natural organic fertilizer that can be used in farmlands and can solve the problem of soil acidification and reduce excessive usage of chemical fertilizers
- As micro-plastics pose a health risk, a growing number of governments have started to limit and reduce the use of plastics. Therefore, using biomass to produce bioplastics will create new industries and output values. This will lead to a reduction in the dependence on petrochemical plastics as well as indirectly reduce carbon emissions. In addition to being reused, bio plastics based on biomass can also be converted into renewable energy like briquette and organic fertilizers, making recycling and utilization of bio plastics more diversified.
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