IIT student produces electricity from waste water

Waste water management is a big issue world wide and specially in India where there is acute shortage of the precious resource in many places but a 23-year-old student of IIT Kharagpur claims he has found a solution.

Apart from finding solutions management of waste water he has also demonstrated producing electricity from it, which could go a long way in protecting the earth's resources.

Manoj Mandelia, who is pursuing integrated MTech at IIT Kharagpur, there was no policy in the country which examined waste as part of a cycle of production-consumption-recovery.

"Waste management still constituted a linear system of collection and disposal which creates health and environmental hazards," he said.

"I developed a product which uses the concept of microbial fuel cell (MFC is a bio-electrochemical system that drives a current by mimicking bacterial interactions found in nature), which could not only treat waste water but also produce electricity in the process," explains Mandelia who heads a team of five people in the project.

The project, named LOCUS which stands for Localised Operation of Bio-cells Using Sewage, can achieve chemical oxygen demand (COD) reduction levels in waste water to about 60-80%.