Breaking the vicious water (pollution) circle. Bangladesh textile industries consume (and waste) huge amounts of ground water resulting in deple...

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Breaking the vicious water (pollution) circle. Bangladesh textile industries consume (and waste) huge amounts of ground water resulting in depletion and growing shortages for municipal and agriculture use. In addition, the more/less/not treated wastewater from these industries pollutes and salinize the surface waters (canals, ponds, rivers) especially in the dry season. This pollution trickles down to the shallow and deeper ground water thereby reducing the ground water quality in addition to its quantity. With thanks to the IFC (World Bank Group), the broad program sponsorship and local support, we started to break down this vicious water (pollution) circle upstream in 19 leading textile industries. This is largely achieved by reducing ground water consumption and wastewater discharge by up to 80%, by reducing and recovering salt in the production and by upgrading and optimizing the wastewater treatment plants as to enable sustainable water recycling.

4 Comments

  1. Thank you Melissa. Unfortunately our reports for the 19 project cases are confidential but if you type the kewords "IFC PaCT Bangladesh" in Google, you can learn more information about this PaCT program. Please note that the savings result mainly from improving operating practice and efficiency in wet processing and utilities. However we learned that it is easier to introduce new technology than to change mindsets and habits especially of dye-house managers. Hence building trust with a step-by-step improvement approach has proven to be most productive.

  2. Congratulations Bruno, your project should be replicate every where. Can you tell me where can read more about the project? How did you manege to involve those textile companies? As I know how hard it is to convince and correct them with new technology adoption.

  3. These results could only be achieved by TEAM work including in-depth assessment and on site trials. Reducing the fresh ground water consumption results in an equivalent reduction of the wastewater discharge volumes and loads after treatment except for salinity which needs to be reduced upstream. Hence our main focus was upstream in the production and utilities. The 19 BD textile industries (16 integrated plants incl. dyeing and finishing + 3 denim finishing and washing plants) consumed 88 - 421 liter/kg of finished fabric. The benchmark water consumption would be about 50 l/kg for integrated plants and 25 l/kg for denim washing plants. In most cases about 50% water reduction was quickly achieved by boosting wet processing efficiency including first time right performance thanks to the invaluable contributions of an international wet processing expert, aside from cutting various spills. Further reductions are achieved by water recycling and recovery of energy and chemicals starting with hot cooling water and last rinses up to brine from dyebaths after removing the fibers and color. Finally on-site trials were performed as to upgrade the effluent treatment plants to include sustainable advanced biological treatment and color removal without the usual (electro-)coagulation and flocculation producing chemical waste sludge. More about this project can be found on LinkedIn in the group Water Technologies topic "Any new technology for water efficiency in Textile Industry?".