The only feedstock that pays you to take it.
A city's wet waste arrives every day of the year with a tipping fee attached — and with glass, sachets, textile and grit mixed into it. Municipal projects are won on the pre-treatment line and on the segregation agreement, not on the digester.
Not all wet waste is equally worth collecting.
| Source | What it is | Contamination risk |
|---|---|---|
| Vegetable markets | Single-origin, high-moisture, highly digestible, and collected from a small number of known points at a known hour. | Low — the best municipal feed there is |
| Hotels & canteens | Cooked food waste with a high energy density. Needs oil and grease management and a depackaging step for delivery containers. | Low to moderate |
| Food processing | Rejects, peel, pulp and washings from processors inside the municipal boundary. Predictable and contractable. | Low |
| Segregated household wet waste | The largest volume by far, and the whole reason a city-scale plant is viable — where two-bin collection is genuinely enforced. | Moderate to high — depends on the route |
| Mixed municipal waste | Unsegregated collection. Recoverable through mechanical separation, but the organic fraction arrives degraded and the inert load is punishing. | High — last resort |
Concentrated, single-origin streams are worth chasing first. Mixed household collection can work, but only where segregation at source is genuinely enforced — and that is a municipal commitment, not an engineering one.
Most of the plant sits in front of the digester.
Inerts are the whole problem. Grit abrades pumps, sand settles in the reactor and steals working volume, film plastic wraps the agitators, and glass ends up in fertiliser that then cannot be sold. Every one of those failures is designed out upstream or lived with for twenty years.
What a municipal plant looks like.
| Typical capacity | Sized to the segregated wet fraction of the collection route |
|---|---|
| Primary feed | Market, canteen, food-processing and segregated household wet waste |
| Availability | Year-round — the steadiest feedstock of the three sectors |
| Pre-treatment | Depackaging, trommel, density and grit separation, slurry conditioning |
| Process | CSTR anaerobic digestion, mesophilic |
| Purification | Water scrubber to SATAT purity, two-stage H₂S removal |
| Fertiliser output | Solid organic manure, subject to inert control at the pre-treatment line |
| Land requirement | Larger than an equivalent agro-industrial plant — the pre-treatment line and tipping floor need the room |
| Commercial models | Concession or long-term waste supply agreement with the urban local body; EPC and O&M by us |
Indicative envelope for scoping only. Sizing follows a waste characterisation study on the actual collection route, run across at least one seasonal cycle.
Three revenues instead of two.
A municipal project is the only configuration where the feedstock arrives with money already attached to it. That third line is what absorbs the cost of the pre-treatment engineering the other two sectors do not need.
Paid by the urban local body for waste taken off its hands — a contracted receipt that arrives whether or not the gas market moves.
BioCNG bottled to SATAT purity and sold into the same mandated blending obligation as any other plant.
Solid organic manure sold into the peri-urban farming belt around the city — provided the inert control was engineered properly.
Municipal organic waste projects sit inside GOBARdhan and the national waste-to-energy framework, alongside the SATAT offtake route for the gas itself. Which instruments a given project can draw on depends on the urban local body, the state and the ownership structure — we map that in the DPR rather than assume it.
How our work has been evaluated →Send us your collection data.
Tonnes per day, the wet fraction, and how segregation actually works on the route today — not how the tender says it should.