Where is India Inc's Waste Going?

With guidelines in place for plastic and e-waste, corporates are moving towards managing their waste more responsibly, in the process bringing formalisation to the sector

Right in the middle of Electronic City in Bengaluru—one of the largest industrial townships in India—is the Infosys headquarters. The 80-acre campus is perhaps an ideal model of what the circular economy could look like: Their aim is to achieve zero waste.

“In 2008, we started the Green Initiatives programme to reduce our environmental footprint. We took on some big goals for energy and water reduction, as well as diverting waste from landfills to either recyclers or composting,” says Guruprakash Sastry, regional head-infrastructure/ green initiatives, Infosys. Today, each Infosys campus across India has its own sewage treatment plant, biogas plant and organic waste converter.

The Bengaluru campus, with about 30,000 employees and 10 food courts, generates about 2.5 tonnes of food waste every day. “We have installed a biogas plant [with a capacity of 2 tonnes] close to the food courts to treat the food waste. The biogas generated is cleaned and piped into the kitchen to replace LPG cylinders,” says Sastry, adding that awareness about waste segregation at the first stage makes it easier to process different kinds of waste. Currently, the biogas generated is equivalent to almost 100 kg LPG per day. “Earlier, once the food was discarded we didn’t know what was happening to it. Now we have full control and we are converting it to energy,” says Sastry.

On the campus, garden waste, too, is collected and transported to a facility in Sarjapur, where it is treated with organic waste convertors. The resulting fertiliser is used on the campus.

The dry waste also makes it to Sarjapur, where it is further segregated. “The scrapyard is designed to separately sort 12 different types of waste including plastic, metal, wood, thermocol, glass, and hazardous waste,” says Sastry. Infosys has tie-ups with authorised recyclers, so that different types of waste go to the right recycler.