It is time to start cleaning up the beaches when the oil spill is freshly entrapped into the sand and silt using the Sand and Silt Washing Reactors (SSWR),said an environmental expert from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT-B) here. It is important to skim the floating oil in the ocean but at the same time it is equally important to clean up the beaches without wasting time,Dr Shyam Asolekar,Professor,Centre for Environmental Science and Engineering of IIT-B who has developed SSWR technology told PTI. "Sooner the better as the oil will get weathered by various atmospheric factors and then it is difficult to dissolve," he said. The SSWR can be of five tonne or 10 tonne capacity and will take 36 to 48 hours for each batch load to clean up the sand. The cleaned sand will be put back in its place,Asolekar who has developed the technology said. Asked whether this technology has been used earlier,the environment engineer said,ONGC had called him in mid-1990s when it had experienced leakage of oily waste water from its facility in Uran,near Mumbai. As a result,two to six inches of sand was loaded with oil in and around one kilometer stretch of the beach. But they never used the technology,he said.
