The key to the problem lies in effective management of water resources. An integrated approach involving water treatment, source reduction, reuse of process water, effluent treatment, recycling of treated effluent and waste-minimisation is urgently required.
Improve process technology: Clean and advanced process technologies can help industry reduce its water demand. For instance, by replacing the conventional bleaching process with totally chlorine bleaching process, pulp and paper companies can almost close their water cycle. But they are costly.
Reuse process water: This involves reusing water in a series, in an open system, for two or more successive but different purposes. This enables use of poor quality water for more than one purpose.
Recirculate process water: Indefinite reuse of same water after treatment for the same purpose. Makeup water is to be used only to replace unavoidable losses. This is far cheaper than installing new process technology and recent technological development has made sure that it can be used by any type of industry.
Rainwater harvesting: This helps industries meet a substantial part of their annual water requirement even as demand on local sources is minimised.
Technology is not the bottleneck
There are enough technologies to solve all water problems and what is more, the prices of these technologies are gradually decreasing. In a nutshell, it quite feasible today for an Indian industry to substantially reduce its water consumption and wastewater discharge by putting efficient systems for recycling and reusing the process water. But for this to happen government policy needs to be overhauled.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment