Srimal Tissera

Srimal Tissera has won the certificate of merit in the field of “public welfare” at the Presidential Awards of 2010 for his invention but not one of the many institutions including the Environment Ministry, the Central Environmental Authority and Science Commission has seen it fit to popularise the compact biogas plant.

No one cares about helping people to reduce costs, laments Mr. Tissera who is now collaborating with a privvate company to manufacture his plants. 415 employees.

While the “keeper” of the digester, Nihal Samarakoon, climbs up to feed the artificial stomach its daily requirement of 15 kilos of food waste and 30 litres of water, Mr. Perera leads the way to the kitchen close-by where large pots of vegetable rice and devilled chicken are being prepared on merrily burning blue flames given out by the biogas.

The biogas has helped the company to cut costs in the form of one cylinder of LP gas priced at more than Rs. 2,000 per week, the Sunday Times learns.

Whereas earlier they faced a garbage disposal issue, those worries are over now, says Mr. Perera, adding that the “waste” or slurry which comes out as a by-product after the production of biogas is used for their small-scale cultivations in the premises and the balance collected into bullies and sold at Rs. 5 a litre. “We don’t have to spray pesticides as this is organic fertilizer,” he adds.

Mr. Tissera’s explanation about his invention is simple, even understood by those uninitiated in the intricacies of chemical reactions. Having gone against the convention of setting up underground bio-gas plants, Mr. Tissera who hastens to add that he is no chemist, says he began experimenting not in a well-equipped laboratory but in his own home at Maharagama.

For nearly seven years he toiled, neglecting his work as an export consultant which put the rice and curry on his family’s table, to come up with this biogas digester.