This Tirupati Campus Is Turning Flower Waste Into Clean Fertiliser & Fuel

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, the process avoids the smoke, soot and harmful gases usually linked to incinerators. A Pune-based organisation has used a similar method to turn plastic waste into poly-fuel. But the SVU reactor can handle both wet and dry waste in the same machine, which means cities may not need separate systems for every kind of garbage.

During the trial, each type of waste gave two useful outputs:

• Temple flowers turned into esters and clean fertiliser.

• Fish and poultry waste produced biofuel and fertiliser.

• Mixed plastics and tyres became liquid hydrocarbon fuels and battery-grade carbon.

• Coconut shells were converted into fuel and activated carbon.

Researchers also found that the waste did not need heavy sorting before being put into the reactor. This is important because most Indian cities still struggle with proper waste segregation. A system that can work with minimal sorting could be easier for municipalities to use at scale.

Giving temple flowers a second life

Tirupati’s temples generate large volumes of floral waste daily, a problem cities across India know well. Elsewhere, two Ahmedabad engineering graduates built a machine that turns temple flowers into organic manure, while Kanpur-based HelpUsGreen has spent years converting flowers collected from temples and mosques into bio-fertilisers and lifestyle products. 

The SVU reactor brings this idea into a far larger system, treating floral waste as just one of many inputs that can be processed alongside plastics, food waste and even hazardous material in a single cycle.

A practical answer to shrinking landfill space

As Indian cities run out of room to dump garbage, projects that recover value from waste rather than bury it are gaining attention. 

Chennai’s biomining project at the Perungudi dumpyard turned more than a million cubic metres of legacy landfill waste into furniture, utensils and construction material, proving that even old, mixed waste can be reclaimed. The SVU trial points to a way of preventing that waste from piling up in the first place.

G Ravi, Revenue Officer of the Tirupati Municipal Corporation, who is associated with the project, said the technology could reduce the volume of waste reaching dumping yards while generating valuable by-products. “This technology views it as a resource,” he said, speaking about the shift in approach.

Professor Varadarajan of SVU’s College of Engineering, who led the research, said the goal is to show that a cleaner environment and economic value creation can go hand in hand. 

The university describes its broader aim as building a “waste and residue-free society,” guided by the philosophy of cleaning up while creating value at the same time.

What comes next

The 12-day trial is only a pilot, and researchers are now working towards scaling the prototype for larger volumes. If that happens, cities like Tirupati, which handle both religious and municipal waste streams at scale, could have a single technology capable of absorbing much of what currently goes to landfills. 

For a country generating ever-increasing tonnes of waste each year, a reactor that does not discriminate between a wilted marigold garland and a crushed plastic bottle could be a meaningful step towards closing the loop.

Images courtesy of TNIE.

Sources:

‘From temple waste to useful fuel: SVU develops zero-residue technology in Andhra‘: by Nethaji Kumaramangalam for The New Indian Express, Published on 07 June 2026

‘India’s new waste management rules face old implementation gaps‘: by Jyotsnika Tiwari for Mongabay India, Published on 06 March 2026

‘Status and challenges of solid waste management in Tirupati city‘: by Venkiteela Lokesh Kumar for Materials Today: Proceedings (ScienceDirect), Published in 2020

‘IIT Bhubaneswar researchers develop reactor to turn waste into wealth‘: by Anand Gupta for EQ International, Published on 22 August 2024

‘Quantification of landfill gas emissions and energy production potential in Tirupati Municipal solid waste disposal site by LandGEM mathematical model‘: by C. Ramprasad, Hari Charan Teja, Vunnam Gowtham and Varadam Vikas for MethodsX, Published on 20 September 2022

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