Biogas from waste in India. Food scraps become fuel, not methane on a dump.

Why India

India produces 62 million tonnes of household and town waste a year, according to Ecologi’s page. Three quarters of it is collected, but only a fifth of what is collected gets treated. The rest goes to dumps and landfill sites, where it harms the land and people’s health.

Half of that waste is organic: food scraps and other things that rot. Buried in a dump, it is cut off from the air. It then breaks down in a way that gives off methane. Ecologi says methane makes up about 29% of India’s greenhouse gas emissions, against a world average of about 18%.

India also needs more and more energy. Ecologi says demand there is growing among the fastest in the world, and that rural India relies largely on coal power stations. These give off carbon dioxide, pollute local water and damage the health of the people who work in them.

How the project cuts emissions

A biogas plant is a sealed tank. Organic waste goes in, and tiny living things called microbes break it down. Because the tank is sealed, the gas they make is caught and kept. That gas is biogas, and it can be burned as fuel. The solids left over can be used as a fertiliser.

The project cuts emissions in two ways at once.

• It keeps waste off the dump. Waste that goes into a biogas plant does not rot in a landfill, so the methane it would have given off never reaches the air.
• It replaces dirtier fuels. The biogas is used for cooking, heating and making electricity. It takes the place of firewood, fossil fuels and power from the grid.

What the project has reported

Ecologi’s page for this project has no timeline of dated updates, so the record is short. It gives three figures.

The first is that the project avoids up to 70,000 tonnes of CO2e a year. CO2e means carbon dioxide equivalent, a way of counting methane and other greenhouse gases on one scale. Note the words “up to”: this is an upper figure, not a measured total.

The second is that the project supported 73 local jobs between 2016 and 2020. The third comes from a survey. It found that 100 families who used to cook on firewood, and now cook on biogas from this project, have cleaner air at home. Ecologi does not give a date for the survey.

Who does the work

Ecologi’s page does not name the organisation that develops or runs the programme, so we will not guess. It says only that the biogas plants are provided at three levels: for single homes, for communities and for institutions.

How the project is checked

We do not choose or run the projects ourselves. They are selected by Ecologi, and this one carries its “Carbon Project Ecologi Approved” mark.

It is also checked from outside. Ecologi says the project is verified by the Gold Standard and links to its entry on the Gold Standard registry, where it is project 311.

What Printlogik has funded here

Ecologi keeps a public record of the projects each of its members has helped to fund. That record names this project among those Printlogik’s contributions have gone to, through the Print A Tree Project. Ecologi does not publish a figure for us project by project, so we cannot tell you how much of the work here was paid for by our orders, and we will not guess. Our total across all the carbon projects we have supported is shown on the Print A Tree page.

Ecologi now lists this project as previously funded, so new contributions no longer go to it. Every order we print still helps: the contribution is made for you through Ecologi and goes to the projects it is funding today.

How your order gets here

1. You order printAny order, of any size. There is nothing to tick and nothing extra to pay.
2. We make a contributionEach invoice triggers a contribution from Printlogik to Ecologi.
3. Emissions are cutEcologi funds projects like this one, and records what we have funded in public.

The UN global goals it supports

The United Nations has set 17 Sustainable Development Goals for a fairer, healthier planet by 2030. Ecologi records this project as supporting 3 of them.

• 3Good health and well-being
• 12Responsible consumption and production
• 13Climate action

Where it is

Kerala, India · 10.5°N, 76.2°E

Location	Kerala, India
Type of project	Biogas
Status	Ecologi lists it as previously funded and no longer takes contributions for it
Full record	See it on Ecologi