Evolving and Implementing Energy Recovering Strategy from Food Wastes at Jawahar Navodaya Vidhyalaya (JNV) Fostering Campus Sustainability

Abstract

A huge quantity of organic food wastes generated in educational campuses goes unutilized and gets disposed of in landfills, despite the tremendous potential to turn the on-campus waste mis-management into a profitable and sustainable venture. The vision of green campus initiative at Jawahar Navodhaya Vidhyalaya (JNV) is to transform itself into a model for a self-sufficient campus. To foster this initiative, we envisaged a system of highly evolved, self-sufficient strategies not only to sustain the needs of the campus but also to reduce costs and generate income through integrated sustainable projects. The project is carried out through a cooperative effort among Pondicherry University researchers and APSCC’s strategic green action plan team for campus sustainability, focused on the campus’s commitment towards sustainability encompassing social equity, environmental management, and economic prosperity in tune with the Principles of Agenda 21 and Millennium Development Goals. The Campus biogas generation project is one such unique attempt which has prompted the JNV campus community to ponder over the causes of significant socio-environmental problems, and subsequently make an attempt to solve them through collaborative effort using scientific processes. This study involved rigorous field visits with observational study, building prototypes to try out various possible alternatives, hoping to arrive at an optimum solution by comparing different experimental models, field work, research and innovative ideas. The goal of the study is to foster student’s experience and learning along with research and planning for reducing fuel consumption through biogas production from organic waste generated within the campus. It is found that by adopting a 7 m3 Antirotatory-anaerobic Baffled Co-coupled Double-digester (ABCD-hybrid) model of an anaerobic digester, enough biogas is produced to replace approximately 6.2 LPG cylinders/month with the potential reduction in petroleum gas of 10.34 % and saving of around INR 7,864 per month.