Indian Railways, a rail network operator owned by the Indian government, is launching a plan to manufacture diesel fuel from plastic.

The railway is setting up plants to manufacture diesel from plastic with technology patented by scientists at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research-Indian Institute of Petroleum (CSIR-IIP).

Railways to set up plants for converting plastic to diesel- Dr Harsh Vardhan (middle) , Dr M.O.Garg, Director-General of CSIR (left), Dr Sudeep Kumar (right), Head, PPD of CSIR and other scientists are seen in the picture. Source: Indian Railways“We are the first to have the capability to convert one tonne of broken buckets, mugs, toothpaste tubes, bottle caps and other polyolefin products into 850 liters" of diesel, says Harsh Vardhan, union minister for Science and Technology and CSIR's vice president."

The move is part of India's overall plans to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels.

The CSIR-IIP has also come up with a way to produce low-carbon jet fuel from the inedible, drought resistant Jatropha plant.

“We have gone several steps ahead in developing alternative sources of jet fuel," Vardhan says. “Jatropha apart, CSIR-IIP has the knowledge to make jet fuel out of any non-edible oil—even the waste cooking oil from our kitchens is soon to become prized material in the market."