Israel Bhila's home-made factory

Source: Sizwe sama Yende

Israel Bhila has been producing diesel from plastics from his makeshift factory in Nkomazi near Malalane.

Source: Sizwe sama Yende

Sizwe sama Yende

Israel Bhila’s site at Mangweni village near Komatipoort may look untidy and cluttered with plastics, bottles, coal dough and rusty homemade machines. It is however a promising and big diesel factory under construction.

A passerby on the R571 road to Mananga border post, along which the 38-year-old’s makeshift factory is situated, may not know something big is happening on the site until he gets closer and ask. This is a site of lofty dreams where Bhila is slowly building a diesel factory.

Bhila converts plastic waste into diesel. Since he started in 2017, he had been selling to locals after he tested the diesel on his truck and found out that it worked properly. His big break has only come recently after a Gauteng-based company contracted him to produce 900 000 litres a month after it was impressed by laboratory results of his diesel.

“It’s a tall order,” Bhila tells The People’s Eye, “but I’ve renegotiated to produce 100 000 litres for now as I try to increase my capacity over the next few months.”

Bhila’s diesel-making project started by chance. He was collecting waste for recycling in 2012 when he met a Chinese national in Maputo, Mozambique, who was in the business of exporting waste to China. The Chinese man connected Bhila to his brother-in-law in China, who told him via email that he was in the business of converting waste into energy. Bhila’s mind then shifted from just being a waste recycler to being a diesel producer.

Bhila explains that the plastic-to-diesel conversion is done through a process called pyrolysis, in which carbon-based materials are heated at extremely high temperatures (about 500°C) in the absence of oxygen and other reactive gases to produce combustible gases that are condensed into combustible liquid (fuel).

He started the project at home with the support of the Chinese man who taught him everything from heating to distilling.

Before the Covid-19 outbreak and lockdown in 2020, Bhila was producing 2 000 litres of diesel and petrol per day. He has been knocking on the doors of various financial institutions for help.

The University of Mpumalanga assisted him to send samples of his pyrolysis products to a laboratory owned by Swiss testing and certification services company SGS, where they were tested and certified in 2021. The Nkomazi Local Municipality gave him six hectares of land to build his factory.

At that time, the Small Enterprise Development Agency drafted his business plan and found that he would need R14 million to establish a diesel-producing plant.

Venda-born and US-educated engineer, inventor and academic, Professor Mulalo Doyoyo, said that government’s efforts were not aggressive enough to support innovation in the country. Doyoyo has many innovations behind his name, the latest being an eco-friendly liquid cement.

“The government should create fertile ground for innovation in all the provinces,” Doyoyo said. “Innovation agencies and structures such as the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research and special economic zones should be available in all corners. The thing about innovation is that you do not plan to innovate, sometimes it’s by accident, and innovators must have access to support,” he added.

Doyoyo said that once the ground was fertile and innovations come about, the country would create jobs. He said that South Africa needed an innovation think-tank with experts from all over the world to create this fertile ground.

He said that poverty was a stimulant for innovation, as witnessed in the US in the 1930s. “During the Great Depression in the US, many inventors popped up; our situation could be a motivation too,” he said. The Great Depression saw the invention of the helicopter, parking meter, walkie-talkie (two-way radio) and electric guitar, as well as xerography (dry photocopying).