By Rakhi Mazumdar

Indal's Hirakud complex houses a 42-year-old smelter, but it's still green

It may have gone green more to conserve scarce resources than to save the environment, but Indian Aluminium's is a happy story, too. In 1996, its thermal power plant and smelter at Hirakud became the first such facility in Asia to be ISO 14001 certified. Since then, its other five units-smelter at Belgaum and Alupuram, alumina plant at Muri, and the Alupuram extrusion facility-geared up for the same.

Last year, Indal re-defined its corporate environment policy to come up with an Environmental Performance Assurance Process. If the first phase of its environmental programme focused on achieving and exceeding regulatory standards, the new phase focused on eco-supply chain management and eco-product design. Says A.K. Kar, Chief Executive of the Hirakud complex: ''We want to be proactively green, instead of just looking at end-of-the-pipe solutions.''

Not an easy job for somebody who manages a 42-year-old smelter, whose operations usually lead to a large-scale degradation of water and air resources. Thus, each activity in the unit is defined, its direct and indirect impact on the environment is noted, and action is taken to minimise the impact.

To do that, the Resource Conservation and Environment Committee-including nine departmental heads, 20 environmental auditors, the chief medical officer, and the plant chief executives-meets once every month. Suppliers and vendors are involved, too. Indal regularly communicates its expectations to all suppliers. The minimum compliance standard has been set at 70 per cent. In addition, it collects feedback from surrounding localities and holds 'open meetings', where NGOs and other institutions participate.

Raw materials and production efficiency make the biggest impact on the environment. Not surprisingly, the unit has been focusing on greater eco-efficiency in these areas. In effluent treatment, Indal uses a unique biological method. called Rotating Bio Contractor (RBC), which involves transferring waste water and effluents into a huge barrel with two rotating discs. At regular intervals, each of the discs is laced with insects that break the effluent into toxic-free elements.

A baggage Indal has had to live with is the wet scrub technology to clean the pot exhaust gases of flouride fumes. Modern-day units use dry-scrub technology, but Indal has managed to improve on wet-scrubbing, reducing the cost of scrubbing by Rs 165 per tonne of metal. And, as Kar says, should anyone doubt whether Indal's green initiatives are working, they only need to look at the 24-acre forest that has come up on the ash mound near the plant.

ORCHID CHEMICALS & PHARMACEUTICALS
Matching Ideals With Requirements

By Nitya Varadarajan

Orchid's K.Raghavendra Rao believes in sharing his environmental practices with others

The greenery around Orchid Chemicals' factory, at Chennai, does not go beyond a waterfall and a patch of grass. But Orchid has done more than its share of protecting the environment. The factory has become akin to a tourist spot; corporate delegations are the chief visitors-wondering how so much got done with so little water. Managing Director, K. Raghavendra Rao does not believe that competitors will steal his secrets if he lets them in. ''If they learn good environment practices from us, the country will benefit,'' he says. It is not just companies, even CII makes Orchid its destination for training in ecological practices.

For Orchid, being clean and green is not just driven by value, it is essential for operations, too. Thus, the company threw merely a cursory glance at the pitiful effluent treatment support provided by the SIDCO industrial estate and went about building its own. Had it not done so, the company could not have expanded production year after year (100 tonnes in 1993, to 700 tonnes in the last count).

Orchid is also the youngest company to get an ISO 14001 certification. Rao himself oversees the internal audit department on a monthly basis, while the ISO team comes once in six months.

However, the company has some complaints against the governmental agencies. For instance, Rao feels that solid inorganic wastes, which are nothing but salts, could be let out into the sea, as this will not damage the environment. However, the government does not allow this, as it feels that this facility can be misused. ''Hence, we have created our own space,'' he says. ''In fact, the State PCB took 50 per cent of our initial investment as caution deposit, and it has still not returned it.''

In liquid management, Orchid has gone beyond the norms of international requirement to absolute zero discharge of effluents. ''Essentially, the process has been divided into two: a system treating effluent containing low salts and low organics and a system which treats high levels of impurities,'' says Rao. An important provision made is in the shape of 'elevated ponds', which can hold effluent water for treatment.

All potential pollutants arising from manufacturing processes are trapped within a closed system for effective neutralisation. Water usage is doled out even for canteen and toilets. There are no water coolants in the company, resulting in savings of 300 cubic metres a day. The waste heat recovery is about 87 per cent.

''Four years ago, we had the same amount of effluents and today too, we have the same, despite manifold production capacity expansion,'' says S. Mani, gm (Engineering, Environment, Health, & Safety). The additional 150 cubic metre leeway gives room for more production. The highly efficient solvent recovery systems result in savings of Rs 90 lakh of methylene chloride, Rs 10 lakh each of acetone and methanol, and Rs 32 lakh of ammonia.

Orchid will continue to enhance its ecological activities. Its R&D has been given mandate in devising improvements, which are not merely cost-effective, but also eco-friendly.

PHILIPS INDIA
It Does Make Things Better 

By Roop Karnani

Philip's pimpri facility doesn't show it, but the plant handles mercury CFC and other chemicals

For a 25-year-old facility, Philips India's Pimpri unit looks remarkably young. The credit goes to Philips' parentage, which made sure that the Indian subsidiary was one of the first to discontinue use of Chloroflouro Carbons (cfc), in 1985.

That was then. For the past six years, Philips has been focusing on a concept which it calls EcoDesign. The idea is simple: take into account the overall impact of a product. EcoDesign is based on the life-cycle perspective starting right from raw materials production, parts manufacture, product assembly, transport, usage and end-of-life, not only for products developed inhouse, but also those purchased.

The company's current green policy focuses on five areas of manufacture: weight of the product, hazardous substances, recyclability, energy consumption, and packaging. Earlier, in the Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) assembled at the Pimpri facility, chemical compounds called polybromobiphenyl ethers were used in lamination for fire-retardant properties. But when the life of the PCB is over and it is incinerated, polybromobiphenyl ethers would emit toxic fumes of a chemical, dioxin, which is highly carcinogenic. By changing the design to a 'green' laminate, the problem was solved. ''We constantly try to find ways to minimise adverse impact of our operations on the environment,'' says L. Ramakrishnan, National Environmental Co-ordinator for all Philips plants in India.

The parent has set targets for all its plants worldwide, using 1994 as the base year. The plan is to reduce energy consumption by 25 per cent, water consumption by 25 per cent, and waste generation by 35 per cent. Emission of hazardous, Category I chemicals such as mercury, benzyne, and cfcs is to be reduced by 98 per cent by 2002. The Pimpri facility is fast moving towards this target. Water consumption is down to 150 kilolitres from 250 kilolitres five years ago. Energy consumption has been reduced by one-third.

Not long ago, every tubelight would be 'flushed' with 70 mg of mercury, to make sure the required 15 mg stayed in the tube. But the 55 mg wastage was not only proving expensive, but hazardous. By switching over to Argon Flush, Philips is able to flush tubelights only with the required 15 mg mercury. It helps that Philips NV's watchful eyes are ever on its India operations.

TATA STEEL
We Also Make Green Steel

By R. Sridharan

From 10,000 ft up above in a Cessna eight-seater, Tata Steel looks nothing like what Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata first built in 1907. It is vastly bigger, its 64-sq. mile Jamshedpur township teems with a million people, and the lush greenery of yore has given way to houses and brick kilns outside the company's lease area. Inside the 3.5-million tonnes per annum plant, there's even less of its 94-year-old heritage. A staggering Rs 7,000 crore facelift has transformed India's oldest steelmaker into a state-of-the-art industrial monument.

No more does red, carbon monoxide-filled smoke shroud the industrial city. The 1.5-million trees that were planted over the past three years, as a run up to the company's millennium celebration, are beginning to bring the greenery back, and the closure of 2.2-million tonnes of old and environmentally unfriendly steel capacity in the past decade has made Tata Steel one of the greenest steelmakers in India. In fact, 10 per cent of the Rs 7,000-crore spent on modernisation has gone into environment-related equipment. That apart, for every tonne of steel produced, an estimated Rs 100 is spent on the upkeep of "green" equipment. Says Jamshed J. Irani, MD, Tata Steel: "For sustainable development to work, we have to use our resources optimally, without any wastage."

Tata Steel is perhaps the only steel-maker in India to have workers as safety and environment inspectors. For instance, at the Jamshedpur facility-where the potential pollutants range from suspended solids to cyanide and ammonia in water to carbon monoxide and benzoalphapyrene (a carcinogenic gas from the coke plant) in air-each of its 44 departments has a safety-health-environment (SHE) committee, which is vice-chaired by a worker. He only looks after SHE, and has no steel-making function. Says B. Muthukumar, MD-designate (Irani retires in July, 2001): "At Tata Steel, green initiatives are driven from the bottom, with a strong top management commitment."

The worker-inspector checks for things like oil leakages, water or steam leakages, noise levels of equipment, and even segregation of waste. If all that sounds too mundane, consider this. In 1999-2000, Tata Steel earned Rs 20 crore by auctioning the waste it would earlier discard. What made the waste saleable this time round was the fact that its Environment Management System (EMS) team decided to sort waste by type. All that it required was an investment of Rs 70 lakh in 448 bins for workers to put in the nine different types of waste identified. This fiscal, the types of waste will rise to 85. Says R.P. Sharma, Chief Environment Auditor and Head of Environment Division: "We plan to earn even more from waste."

The hardcore cleansing that the steelmaker has put itself through has helped its turnaround to no small extent. Every one giga calorie in energy that the company cuts down on adds Rs 100 crore to the bottomline; 1 tonne reduction in raw material consumption saves it Rs 1,500 per tonne of steel made; and for every 1 per cent improvement in waste utilisation, the coffer is richer by Rs 1 crore. The improvements at the company have just been going north. Stack emission is down from 9 kg per tonne of crude steel (TCS) in 1994-95 to 1.80 kg/TCS; water pollution is down by 66 per cent in the past six years; raw material consumption has been slashed by a quarter; and in the last one year alone, specific energy consumption is down by 0.4 giga calorie/TCS.

But Tata Steel is still worried about the fly ash generated by its power plant. It is fast running out of dumping ground and its application with the Bihar government for another 600 acres of adjacent land has been gathering dust for the last 30 years. "If the situation continues, there many be no Tata Steel in another 10 years," says Sharma. That should get the newly-created Jharkhand's attention.

1  2  3

Issue Contents  Write to us   Subscription   Syndication 

INDIA TODAY |  INDIA TODAY PLUS | COMPUTERS TODAY  |  TEENS TODAY  
THE NEWSPAPER TODAY | MUSIC TODAY | ART TODAY | CARE TODAY