By Sanjay Vadhera

ONE OF the biggest challenges for the hotel industry is the sheer scale of the operating costs. Heat, light and power are huge monetary guzzlers. Today we have the technology; there are ways to imbibe efficiency into this aspect of running hotels and bringing down costs, hoteliers just have to come in with an open mind.
We started our business in Kenya with the setting up of the Kenya Organic Research Centre for Excellence (KORCE), a centre which handles all varieties of waste from municipal solid waste, plastic waste to even e-waste, converting this into energy. A similar process can be deployed in hotels, which produce massive amounts of waste that could be easily converted into energy to meet their in-house energy requirements.
This particularly becomes vital when large three hundred or four hundred hotels have their occupancy to fall near about 40 per cent during the off season periods, which means that the overheads are not being recovered. This especially holds true for a country like India where because of the intensity of the heat you have massive air conditioning bills, coupled with those of cooking gas and other necessities. There needs to be a system that can cater to the hotel’s individual demands, without becoming financially taxing. This would ease the pressure on the hotel business.
We need to bring in the technology, which is available to bring the waste under the power of zero-zero air pollution, zero soil pollution, zero water pollution and noise pollution lesser than four decibel points. One would believe that hotels do not really contribute to noise pollution but if one goes to the ancillary, service or the back of the house areas, this myth will be shattered.
To combat these issues, we have developed a Dual Multi-Feed Reactor which, in layman terms, can be called a bio digester. This technology allows users to feed in any kind of waste, be it human waste which we call night soil, kitchen waste, etc. Everything can directly go into it and the best part is that it produces no smell and does not attract flies, which means that it can be easily accommodated with the premises itself.
A single individual produces approximately 1.75 kilos of waste per day in a third world country and in the developed world the number is 4.5 kilos. This is all in the form of night soil, kitchen waste, food waste, disposables, etc. We in the developing world need to make sure that we adopt a program of waste management and damage control so that we do not reach the obscene levels of the developing world. These 1.75 kilos would in fact be more in hotels. All that needs to be done is that an ancillary area of half an acre or possibly lesser should be kept aside for waste management and the production of sustainable energy. This is something that is not too expensive or too difficult to do.
To make things clearer, suppose we take a hundred room hotel, it can give almost about 80,000 cubic meters of biogas everyday day! Talk about bigger ones and you can get much more. Biogas is a mixture of carbon dioxide and methane. Now carbon dioxide may be the damaging gas but the methane accounts for 96.7 octane of fuel and a separator unit can easily separate the two gases, and the methane can go directly to the kitchens. An advantage of this is that even if the chef leaves the burner on without igniting it, the kitchen is not at risk of being blown up as the moment the gas comes into the atmosphere it will turn into water. The left over carbon dioxide, being a cold gas, can be used for the hotel’s air conditioning. What is left at the end is solid waste with a less than seven ph value, which can be used as organic fertilizer for landscaping.
When it comes to cost, the thumb rule of any sustainable energy is that it should not exceed more than six months of one’s total projected turnover. So it is not expensive and can start producing within fifteen days of installation. If desired, a fast start can be achieved by adding five trucks of gobar gas as a booster.
The product is available and all that is required is that the service industry has to come in with a open mind. The heaps of waste that are dumped is pure energy thrown away. All that is required is recognition of its potential and the subsequent adoption of appropriate technology.

The author is CEO and Founder of Greenergia Limited & KORCE. As told to Bikramjit Ray.