CEW Features
Building a Circular Biorefinery Circular Economy is the talk of the time. Almost all the organizations these days have been practicing to achieve it. Here the author articulates the practices being followed by Godavari Biorefineries.
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reviously the World used to utilize resources in a linear fashion. We have been hearing more about the circularity as we discuss the ban on single-use plastic bags. But if we think deeper, much of our current consumption is driven by ‘single-use’, which is nothing but the linear approach. This is the
basis of the oil economy – extraction of petroleum from the earth, its conversion to fuels and products that we consume, and then disposal of the same. We need to ‘kick’ this oil habit. There is a fundamental shift in such thinking. In the petroleum economy, what you have today is less than what you had yesterday. We measure resources in terms of years of resources left. There will be a ‘sunset’ to these resources. In the circular economy, the use of renewable 44 • December 2019
resources is important; and if done right, what you have today, can be as much as what you had the previous day. This is the fundamental paradigm shift. Godavari Biorefineries has always believed in a circular and cascading bio-refinery from renewable resources.
Godavari uses sugarcane as a primary feedstock from which to make sugar, biofuels (ethanol), ethanol based chemicals, renewable power, compost, bio-composites, and other products. Every process stream is seen as a resource. The company commenced ethanol production in the 1960s, when molasses used to be considered as a waste. Today, our capacity of ethanol production is over 80 million litres per year. Over 20 years ago, Godavari pioneered
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