Indian Express 18.11.2009
Japan unit recycles waste to make rails — for Delhi Metro
Riding on the Delhi Metro, it’s hard to believe where the rails for the high-speed trains get their strength: from unwanted plastic garbage in a nondescript industrial Japanese township called Kitakyushu.
At a sprawling, self-contained steel facility in the heart of the country’s industrial area, high-speed rails and other steel products are churned out by Japanese giant Nippon Steel. Delhi Metro is among the railway systems in different countries that procure steel, and rails, from this company.
But the story lies in the making of this steel. Amid stacks of steel and iron, a stack of smelly plastic bags and containers stick out like a giant sore thumb. This urban waste from Kitakyushu area powers the furnaces of Nippon Steel.
Company officials say Nippon Steel has learnt and patented the harnessing of municipal waste. Unlike most facilities, including Indian companies, that incinerate plastic to use as fuel, Nippon Steel is now treating plastic to directly create energy sources for steel production: creating coke, hydrocarbon, and coke oven gas.
In a country with a huge disposable culture — even food and fruit come packed in plastic here, with no ban on the material even in the ‘eco-town’ of Kitakyushu — plastic waste is not hard to come by. An average Japanese, say studies here, throws away 10 kilograms of plastic each year. And in the factory area, where mountains of plastic are separated manually each day, two giant air ducts give company to the two workers posted there to keep down the smell from large quantities of plastic waste.
“We need coke and oil to fuel the furnaces. Whether we get it from a mine or the local garbage can, we need it — that is unavoidable,” says Y Arita, from the company. It is not a totally carbon emission-free process, though, as energy is used to treat plastic.
Arita says orders for steel from India have risen in the past year — besides rails for high-speed Delhi Metro trains for its Phase-II, the demand from the country is for generators and automobiles.
Concern for environment
In Kitakyushu, plastic, and the steel furnaces belching smoke, are a huge concern — and a sort of debt the community wants to redeem. In the environment museum, 20 minutes from the Nippon facility, senior citizen Yamamoto, leader of a local women’s group and environmental volunteer, bends over a freshly cleaned plastic wrapper, cutting and folding to morph it into a butterfly.
Kitakyushu got so polluted in the 1960s, Yamamoto says, that the area’s adjoining sea was called the ‘sea of death’. Now, the area feverishly works at reducing its carbon footprint, and has won acclaim from the United Nations for its recycling and waste and pollution treatment.
At the museum, plastic bottles and cans are displayed almost like works of art: in a way of expressing that garbage is a part of life and should be recognised as a challenge.
