Every day, more than a lakh pilgrims visit Tirupati, and with them comes a flood of offerings: fresh flowers, coconut shells, plastic bottles and packaged snacks.

Add household kitchen waste, poultry scraps, and discarded tyres to that mix, and the city's garbage problem becomes particularly knotty. 

Most of it cannot be processed by a single system, which is why municipalities usually run several separate waste streams side by side.

A pilot project at Sri Venkateswara University (SVU) in Tirupati has just shown that this need not be the case.

Between 10 and 22 May 2026, engineers from SVU's College of Engineering, working with Chennai-based Entity One Company, ran a 12-day trial of a 50 kg capacity prototype called the Ramcharan Pyrolysis Reactor. 

The machine was fed 10 different waste streams, among them floral waste, tender coconut shells, poultry and fish waste, mixed plastics, tyres and thermocol, the very mix of garbage Tirupati generates daily as a major pilgrimage centre. 

By the end of the trial, each waste stream had been converted into biofuels, liquid hydrocarbons, fertilisers or carbon-based products, with virtually nothing left to send to a landfill.

One machine for 10 kinds of waste

The reactor uses a process called plasma pyrolysis. In simple terms, waste is put inside a closed chamber with no oxygen and heated to 300°C to 500°C. This breaks the waste down into useful materials.

Since the waste is not burnt,........

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