Charter for Water Recycling and Pollution Prevention in Pulp & Paper Industries

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Charter for Water Recycling and Pollution Prevention in Pulp & Paper Industries

Publisher:  Central Pollution Control Board (India)

Prologue:

The Indian paper industry is one of the important industrial sectors of the country which has shown tremendous growth potential in last few years. Indian paper industry is marked with diversity features. Production capacity varies in Indian paper industry from 15 tpd to 1500 tpd. Indian paper industry uses wide variety of raw materials which makes standardization of production process difficult. The industry uses wide spectrum of technology, which varies among industries as well as within the industry. The major challenge facing Indian pulp and paper industry are improvement in resource efficiency, sustaining in global competition, coping with fibre shortage and addressing the environment issues & challenges. Although in last decade Indian paper industry has implemented various projects on the upgradation of technology and cleaner production initiatives leading to improvement in various indicators such as specific energy consumption, specific water consumption and specific effluent generation. However, issues of technological obsolesce and lacks of standardization in production process are needed to be addressed urgently in mission mode for the sustainable growth of paper industry in the new order of environmental compliance and in global competition.

During 2012-2013, CPCB implemented a ‘charter for water recycling & pollution prevention in Pulp & Paper industries in Ganga River Basin’ in five identified clusters of Pulp & Paper industries located in Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh. Basic premise of industrial pollution abatement for river Ganga in charter is based on (i) participatory approach (ii) benchmarking of the processes and waste-minimization/ cleaner production options (iii) technology augmentation and process standardization (iv) reduce, recycle and reuse of various streams without and with treatment (partial or full treatment) for different end-point uses i.e. cascade management of water utilization and wastewater management (v) end of pipe treatment for existing units with retrofitting of recycle and reuse options (vi) effective and continuous monitoring programme. Impact assessment of the charter has shown tremendous improvement in the environmental status of pulp and paper industry in the identified clusters. Now it is time to implement the charter for all the pulp and paper industries in the Ganga River Basin States.

 

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