HEMRL joint director Dr R K Pandey — the project is his brainchild — said his target was to convert the waste explosives into non-toxic, non-hazardous and useful material through an economically viable and eco-friendly process.

Pandey was recently awarded a Ph D by the University of Pune (UoP) for his research work on conversion of higher energy and hazardous material into fertiliser.

“Waste explosives are generated either due to expiry of their life or rejection during manufacturing process. Military firing ranges and other places where different types of ammunition is tested are found to contaminate the soil with explosives due to partial detonation. These explosive contaminants leach into the ground due to their poor water solubility and pollute the groundwater,” he said. “Besides, the hundreds of tons of waste energetic material is generated by the ordnance factories and various defense establishments is subjected to disposal by conventional methods like open burning and detonation, which release harmful ingredients causing pollution,” he added.

To solve this problem, Pandey conducted extensive research and came up with a technology that can convert the waste energetic materials into an effective chemical fertiliser.

“We converted the combustible cartridges cases containing nitro cellulose explosives into a chemical fertilizer. We have tested the fertiliser successfully on wheat plant,” he said.

Meanwhile, Pandey received huge appreciation for his presentation on “Compost bioremediation” at an international conference on “Theory and Practice of Energy Materials” held recently at China.

“Compost bioremediation is a novel concept involving micro-organisms of matured compost. It is an effective method for remediation of soil contaminated with explosives,” he said. “When we applied the compost bioremediation method on small quantity of soil mixed with an explosive - trinitrotoluene (TNT) at the HEMRL lab, it was found that TNT degradation took place about three times faster than the conventional methods. While the out put was completely non contaminated soil,” he said. Pandey denied explain his technology in detail for obvious reasons. “It is just the beginning. So describing the entire concept will not be good,” he said.