Dr. Medha Tadpatrikar: A trip to wildlife sanctuary  in 2009 was the basis of our innovation. One day while visiting we were forbidden to go in one particular area, when we inquired the reason, we were told that a deer has been killed. Afterwards we found the reason for that death and it was a few plastic bags in the stomach of the deer. We were appalled like anyone would, but did not give it much thought. Over the next few months anytime we used to speak about this trip Shirish and myself used to say someone should do something about this, how come such things are allowed to happen? We were like most people who see the problem, grumble, complain and don’t do anything about that problem. I guess this indifference of ours was the reason we decided to do something

 

So we started experimenting.  but had no idea what to do, Our Eureka moment came when we saw piece of ice melting. The idea was simple if water turns to ice and again back to water, can we do exactly same with plastic. Can we turn plastic back to hydrocarbons, so we started experimenting

 

But after many trials we started to get the results. The gas that came out had a smell and it also burned. Then we got some oil like substance on top of water.  After testing those we realised we are on to recovering usable fuel from waste plastic.

 

After kitchen experiments, we built our first machine where we manage to turn the waste plastic to fuel.

 

The process is simple  he machine effectively reverses the plastic production process; where the Themo Catalytic Depolymerisation process cracks the long chains of polymer to produce useable fuel.