Too hot to handle

India has tightened guidelines for storage of toxic industrial waste. But is it enough?

A fire at Ankleshwar forced India to rethink how it handles hazardous waste. Drums carrying dangerous industrial sludge flew amid leaping flames and burst in the air at a waste storage at the industrial complex in Bharuch district of Gujarat on April 3 last year. Ash fell all around. People in nearby villages were told to evacuate; many suffered coughing, headache, nausea and burning sensation in the nose and throat.

It could have turned into a disaster worse than the Bhopal gas tragedy but for the change in the wind direction away from other factories (see 'Bhopal to Bharuch', Down To Earth, April 30, 2008).

Fire at Ankleshwar exposed careless handling of waste
Photographer:Ravleen Kaur
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The fire burnt 250 tonnes of toxic industrial waste at the treatment, storage and disposal facility or tsdf in Ankleshwar. This waste had been sent there for incineration at 1,100C because it was too dangerous to reuse or dump in a landfill. And burning it under ordinary conditions could release pollutants like cancer-causing dioxins and furans.

Waste oil and sludge--all paid for by industries--were leaking from barrels at Bharuch Enviro Infrastructure Ltd (beil), the tsdf that caught fire. Though beil --of which pesticide giant United Phosphorous is a major equity holder--cannot incinerate more than 50 tonnes of waste a day, it had crammed over 12,800 tonnes in sheds with narrow passage in between.

Prompted by the accident, the Central Pollution Control Board (cpcb) in April 2008 set up a committee under its former adviser R K Garg to stipulate detailed and explicit guidelines for storage of incinerable hazardous waste at captive incinerators and tsdfs, which are landfills with or without incinerators. In November, the board announced new guidelines (see Storage guidelines). Till then tsdfs were not bound by any time limit for storing hazardous incinerable waste, though being reactive and inflammable, the waste is risky to store-- beil and the factory inspector in Ankleshwar believe the April fire occurred due to a reaction between the waste and the steel drum in which it was stored. Only industries were told not to store such waste for more than 90 days on their premises.

The committee decided that a tsdf should not store hazardous waste for more than six months. It noted sampling, analysis and mixing of the right kind of waste before incineration could take three months, but considering the time an incinerator requires for repairs, which is an annual affair, six months' storage time is appropriate.

beil had waste lying there for up to two years, even though the Gujarat Pollution Control Board (gpcb) had allowed it 90 days' storage time.

Industries in India produce hundreds of tonnes of waste every day that cpcb classifies harmful to our health and the environment. It can be toxic, flammable, corrosive, radioactive or reactive. Of this inflammable organic waste produced by industries like pesticide, pharmaceutical and refinery has to be incinerated. These are mostly synthetic chemicals that, scientists say, do not easily break down in the environment and deposit in human bodies through the food chain. They interfere with our biochemistry that affects our intelligence, immunity, behaviour and reproduction. Benzene used in bulk drug factories, for example, is a carcinogen. Exposure to it for a long time can be fatal.

Ten months after the fire--and despite orders to do so--neither gpcb nor the factory inspector of the area nor beil itself knows the nature of the waste burnt and the company it came from.

On July 8, cpcb issued directions to beil regarding safety--like installing smoke and fire detectors, water sprinklers, providing ventilation, labelling drums to identify waste--under the Environment Protection Act 1986. The facility was asked to submit an action plan for incinerating the 12,800 tonnes of waste lying on its premises, and not to accept fresh waste till it had done so.

beil was given three months to act upon the directions. It trimmed the size of some sheds to create a wider passage between them, laid the storage areas with concrete flooring, installed fire hydrants and smoke detectors and labelled the drums. "We have spent over Rs 7 crore on upgrading. Each drum has been painted and labelled as per the categories in hazardous waste rules," said P N Parmeswaran, vice-president (environment) of United Phosphorus.

However, 4,000 tonnes of waste was still lying at the facility in December end. According to cpcb, 7,000 tonnes remained to be treated on October 13. So in more than six months, the company could take care of only 5,800 tonnes. Of this 1,000 tonnes were sent to another tsdf, Gujarat Enviro Protection and Infrastructure, in Surat, according to the documents obtained from gpcb under rti. As per beil's stated capacity at least 7,500 tonnes should have been incinerated in six months.

Environmental activists in Anklesh- war are now angry over the Madhya Pradesh High Court's order in Decem- ber allowing beil to incinerate 350 tonnes of toxic waste from the Union Carbide (now Dow Chemical) plant in Bhopal. "When they are not able to manage the waste of this industrial area, how can they take care of the waste in the Union Carbide factory?" asked Zia Pathan, a lawyer in Ankleshwar and member of Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti, a non-profit active in Gujarat.

Will beil be nailed? No criminal case is filed against it (see Where is the punishment?). Pollution control boards can act against the beil director under section 15 of the Environment Protection Act in case of loss of health or vegetation, for which the culprit can get jailed for five years. But they have not done so. Proving impact on health and vegetation is not easy. "If people have breathing disorders how can one know it is because of beil?" asked Pathan.

Disposal facilities are not the final solution, but are good business as long as subsidized

India generates 8.14 million tonnes of hazardous industrial waste in a year, according to cpcb. Of this, at least 350,000 tonnes have to be incinerated. However, the capacity of the tsdfs in the country to incinerate waste is much less 126,900 tonnes a year.

According to the Hazardous Waste Management Rules, 1989, it is mandatory that industries send their hazardous waste to a treatment facility. India has 25 operating tsdfs and not all of them have incinerators.

Emerging waste management companies see big business opportunity in this gap, especially since the Union Environment and Forests Ministry initiated a scheme in March 2007 to provide financial assistance of up to Rs 2 crore (equal to the state grant of Rs 2 crore) for setting up a tsdf through public-private partnership. This is besides the grants by industry associations and subsidized land by the states. Work on nine tsdfs has begun since 2007.

The potential size of the hazardous waste management business is between Rs 900 crore and Rs 2,300 crore a year (see Expensive treatment).

Three private companies--Ramky Enviro Infrastructures Ltd, Gujarat Environment Protection and Infrastructure Ltd (gepil) and upl Environmental Engineers Ltd--among them have built 22 tsdfs (see Waste managers). With 16 tsdfs, Ramky Enviro Infrastructure has the biggest share in the business with a turnover of Rs 150 crore.

View image Waste managers Ramky Group It has many businesses like construction, a pharmaceutical park, real estate, finance and investment. Turnover Rs 1,050 crore; TSDFs 16 Luthra Group A textile giant in Surat with an annual asset value of Rs 400 crore. TSDFs 4 United Phosphorous Ltd It has developed more than 100 insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, fumigants and rodenticides, according to its website. Turnover Rs 4,000 crore. TSDFs 2 Expensive treatment Given that these tsdfs charge between Rs 12,000 and Rs 20,000 per tonne of incinerable waste, treating the total incinerable waste generated in 10 states (rest have negligible share) in a year will require Rs 420 crore to Rs 700 crore. Rest of the hazardous waste, 7.79 million tonnes, has to be either sent to landfills directly (Rs 600-Rs 1,200/ tonne) or stabilized before dumping in landfills (Rs 1,200-Rs 3,000/ tonne). A back of the envelop calculation shows industry in India will have to shell out between Rs 900 crore and Rs 2,300 crore in a year.

gepil runs tsdfs in Surat, Haryana, Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Alang, and is a division of textile giant Luthra Group. "We are the first in India to have a common incinerator, in 2001," said Priyesh Bhatti, chief executive officer of gepil. The group is definitely eager to invest in waste management. It is constructing an incinerator at its proposed hub of textile industries in Palsana, Gujarat Eco-textile Park, which has got a Rs 40-crore grant from the Union commerce ministry, though the park is not supposed to generate hazardous waste.

"They have got a no-objection certificate (from gpcb) for setting up only non-polluting industries, so where is the need for an incinerator? I have filed a case in the National Environment Appellate Authority against this," said M S H Sheikh, president of Brackish Water Research Centre, a non-profit in Surat.

Bhatti said, "I can set up an incinerator anywhere and it can receive waste from anywhere in the state. This incinerator will be novel in the sense it will recover heat to generate power. I will supply power to textile industries."

upl Environmental Engineers Ltd, with a turnover of Rs 100 crore, is the environmental services subsidiary of the United Phosphorus Ltd. It has two tsdfs beil in Ankleshwar and one in Ernakulam in Kerala.

"I haven't heard of any tsdf operator incurring losses.

Maintaining the right temperature inside an incinerator is crucial

They decide the rates for disposal on their own and many times factories that send waste to their tsdf are shareholders," said Shyam R Asolekar, head of the Centre for Environmental Science and Engineering at iit Bombay.

Industries say they have no option but to pay whatever they are charged. "Since becoming a member of a tsdf is a compulsory requirement to get clearance from the pollution control board, there is no option but to pay whatever the rate," said Atul Buch, president of the Ankleshwar Industry Association.

According to an industry insider tsdf prices have at least a 15 per cent profit margin. Maintenance is the biggest operating (22 per cent) cost.

Environmentalists say waste disposal, if properly done, is very expensive. "In industrialized countries incineration costs at least three times of what they are charging in India because they use costly pollution control equipment. This is also the reason most northern countries have gotten rid of their polluting industries by outsourcing it to poorer countries," said Nityanand Jayaraman of sipcot Area Community Environmental Monitors, a Chennai-based organization.

Hazard in waste
Lack of fear of the law is evident in the manner tsdfs operate in India. gepil's landfill in Surat is located within metres of a creek, which receives a lot of water during high tide, leading to run-off from the landfill. "About 25 buffaloes died eight months ago after drinking water from Gabheni creek," said Rameshwar Vistar of Gabheni village, where the tsdf is located. "In March last year we woke up to noxious emissions in the middle of the night. We were forced to run out of our homes. We lodged a complaint with the police but they still burn waste between 2 am and 5 am."

Waste's energy value is lost in incineration and the resulting ash has to be landfilled

This is how the company replied to a gpcb notice in 2007 on noxious fumes "For most people, the process of smelling gives little information concerning the ingredients of a substance. It only offers information related to the emotional impact."

"They get waste from industries at a very high price (Rs 12,000 per tonne), which they either dump in the creek or sell to brick manufacturers as cheap fuel," alleged Hasmukhbhai, sarpanch of Gabheni.

gpcb served the facility a notice in June 2007, which said that barrels storing incinerable waste were found leaking, while "strong pesticide odour with hazy climate was experienced" in one of the godowns. The notice also mentioned a report by cpcb saying, "The secondary chamber (of the incinerator) was not found in operation. Though there was no feeding of liquid waste and fuel in the secondary chamber, the sensor was showing false temperature values...Operators were observed to be writing wrong values, particularly temperature, at the secondary chamber, though it was not in operation."

A gpcb official asking not to be named said these things had been reported to the head office, but to no avail.

In Pithampur in Dhar district of Madhya Pradesh, where Ramky runs a tsdf called MP Waste Management Project, the situation is no different. In June last year, 40 tonnes of hazardous waste from the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal was dumped there. "The transportation was done in the middle of the night without the knowledge of villagers there. There is no mention of what was done with the sludge resulting from treating the waste with lime," said Rachna Dhingra of the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal. The sludge has to be treated in an effluent treatment plant.

As per the documents obtained under rti by Dhingra, the transporter who carried the waste from Bhopal to Pithampur was from Ankleshwar. The transporter was not authorized under the hazardous waste rules, but was still granted permission by the Madhya Pradesh pollution control board to transport waste at Rs 42 lakh for three trucks for a distance of just 300 km.

According to cpcb, the incinerator at the Pithampur site will take another six months to become operational, but the facility is already buying incinerable waste from industries and stocking it in Pithampur and Udaipur in Rajasthan. The Udaipur facility does not have an incinerator either. "The Pithampur facility is within 500 metres of village Tarapur, which goes against the criteria for a landfill site. Through an rti, we found that their piezometer, used for measuring impurities in groundwater, was not working," said Ajay Dubey, founder and secretary of Prayatan Environment Action Group in Bhopal.

Mumbai Waste Management Ltd in Taloja industrial area of Maharashtra, also run by Ramky, boasts the largest hazardous waste incinerator in India built at a cost of Rs 18 crore. It has 2,516 industries as members. But big is not necessarily better. sipcot Area Community Environmental Monitors collected air samples 50 metres from the facility in 2005 and found two chemicals above limits set by the US Environment Protection Agency; one, Methylene Chloride, is a known carcinogen. This when Ramky was leased 40 hectares, worth over Rs 2 crore, at Rs 4 lakh for setting up the tsdf, and charges Rs 12,000-22,000 per tonne of incinerable waste.

In Delhi's Najafgarh zone, a tsdf was cancelled after people filed a petition in the Supreme Court. "The proposed site was less than 500 metres from our village and the Najafgarh drain. A cattle shed is just next to the land. Any industry of Delhi is at least 40 km away," said Dayachand, a retired school teacher in Ghumen Hera village.

In Gummidipoondi village of Tamil Nadu's Thiruvallur district, Ramky has been operating a tsdf for six months despite protests. "The panchayat and industries association passed a resolution that they do not want the facility. But they used police force and now we are made to suffer the bad odour day and night," said T Sudhakar, a resident of nearby Papankuppam village.

"We even filed a case in the Supreme Court in April 2007 as part of the ongoing hazardous waste case, but before it came up for hearing, they had constructed the facility," said Jayaraman.

Some industry associations run their own tsdfs for which land is usually given at subsidized rates, like in Vatva industrial area in Ahmedabad and Nandesari in Vadodara. The Green Environment Services Cooperative Society Ltd in Vatva runs both the common effluent treatment plant (cetp) and the tsdf for the area. Despite the infrastructure, the effluent goes into the Sabarmati river via a stream near the cetp. "Industries do not complain because if they ask for compliance they will be forced to pay more for proper treatment," said a former industry association president of Vatva.

Landfills at Taloja, Vatva, Gabheni and Ankleshwar have come up in the middle of agricultural fields. These will be rendered useless once they are filled.

People don't want tsdfs in their backyard. They are expensive. And they are not a complete solution to waste disposal. According to a presentation by cpcb, "On the one hand, the energy content of the hazardous waste is wasted, and on the other, extra energy is required for incineration. Volume reduction is generally not 100 per cent and the ash generated is again hazardous waste and requires secured landfill for disposal."

"Even with all the subsidies and political support, the fact remains that managing a landfill and an incinerator is dirty and dangerous work," said Ramesh Suri, regional geocycle project head of Holcim Services (South Asia) Ltd, which is incinerating hazardous waste in its cement kilns on a trial basis. "How long can the government go on giving subsidy?"

Enforcement and monitoring are the key to safety

Having tsfds and guidelines in place does not mean the waste has been taken care of. As the beil accident showed, cpcb's guidelines that existed before the new ones, like mandatory labelling of drums, were not enforced.

"A disaster is waiting to happen at any of these facilities. None of them is following the guidelines for fire fightng," said a cpcb official who did not want to be identified. "Unless we issue them directions nothing will happen. But directions have to come from the top."

Technically, organic hazardous waste with a calorific value above 2,500 kilocalorie per kg is to be incinerated because it cannot be recycled, reused or safely dumped in a landfill. Waste oil, spent solvents, waste from pesticide, pharmaceutical and refinery units falls in this category.The calorific value of the waste affects the temperature in the incinerator, therefore to maintain the right temperature the waste has to be mixed in the right proportion. But is incineration being done as per rules?

At Nandesari industrial complex in Vadodara, the incinerator was emitting black smoke and was switched off when the Down To Earth team entered its premises. gpcb reports in June 2007 observed only liquid, not solid, waste was being fed into the gepil incinerator in Surat. "Solid waste has to be combined with liquid waste before incineration. It needs more secondary fuel (like light diesel) to burn which is expensive, so probably tsdf operators delay burning it," said Shyam R Asolekar, head of the Centre for Environmental Science and Engineering at iit Bombay. "It is very difficult to know if they are dumping the incinerable solid waste as well in the landfill. Who can check?" asked Sheikh of Brackish Water Research Centre. cpcb officials say they can't be present inside a tsdf 24 hours.

Ideally, dioxins, furans, heavy metals like mercury, a neurotoxin, and other ambient air parameters should be monitored at the incinerator chimney at least once in six months (see Check it). But only sulphur and nitrogen dioxides and particulate matter are checked regularly because there is not enough facility to check other parameters. Even after the beil fire, dioxins and furans were not measured in the air, for lack of facility, while air samples for checking heavy metals had to be sent to a private lab in Mumbai. "Now we have set up a Trace Organics Lab at the cpcb head office in Delhi, where we can test emissions for dioxins and furans," said a board official. Testing one sample for dioxins or furans in Belgium costs Rs 40,000.

Check it Emission standards for incinerators
* Only in special cases **Toxic equivalence is chlorine concentration of a particular dioxin or furan; Source CPCB

Waste dumped in a landfill is a problem because of its quantity. A landfill has to be lined with impervious material like concrete or special plastic to prevent the waste from leaching into the ground. "Waste needs to be checked for its toxicity before being dumped in a landfill but we do not have good labs for that. Everything is being dumped into the landfills," said Paritosh Tyagi, former chairman of the cpcb.

Once filled, a landfill is covered with soil and usually a green belt is maintained over it. tsdf operators have to monitor the chemicals leaching into the ground, gas and surface water till 30 years after its closure. "Nobody knows what havoc is wreaked underground by the toxic waste," said Nityanand Jayaraman of sipcot Cuddalore Community Environment Monitors.

Proper monitoring will require a bigger and better equipped team. "In one state board of Germany, there are 2,000 employees, while the technical staff of the pollution control board (pcb) in Karnataka, which is the size of Germany, the strength of technical staff is 260," said Jurgen Porst, senior adviser to the Karnataka pcb and member of German development cooperation gtz.

According to the 2008 report of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science and Technology, Environment and Forests, "A technical person in the Gujarat pcb spares 1.77 days to monitor an industry in a year...while in Maharashtra the person spends only 1.23 days a year. This includes time taken on travelling." According to the Supreme Court's monitoring committee on hazardous waste, 77 per cent chairpersons and 55 per cent member secretaries in state pcbs are not qualified enough to hold the post.

Four alternatives to disposal facilities

1) burn it with cement

Cement manufacturers like Lafarge and Holcim have undertaken trial of co-processing hazardous waste in cement kilns that operate at 1,400C and above. Holcim has completed trial runs for 14 hazardous materials and is using waste for co-processing in 25 of its plants in India. "Anything that can be destroyed at a temperature ranging from 200C to 2,100C can be put into a cement plant," said Ramesh Suri of Holcim Services (South Asia) Limited. Cement even binds with heavy metals, he added.

cpcb is drafting guidelines for co-processing hazardous waste in cement plants. It conducted four trials over 2005-06 in Gujarat, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Chhattisgarh.The monitoring results showed while dioxins and furans remained below the limits for a hazardous waste incinerator, there was an increase in particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide in some cases.

According to a presentation by Jurgen Porst of gtz, co-processing will lead to lower greenhouse gas emissions by saving fossil fuel used in incinerators and cement plants. The waste is both burnt in the kiln and used as fuel for the kiln. "A substitution by 50 per cent (of fossil fuel in a cement plant) in EU is equivalent to saving emissions from 10 million cars," it said. Besides, a cement kiln has much higher temperature compared to an incinerator, keeps waste for longer inside it and has more oxygen leading to complete combustion, according to the presentation.

But not all kinds of waste can be fed into a cement kiln. According to Porst, too much chlorine causes blockage, corrosion and emissions, and wastes containing mercury or thallium and too much heavy metals like electronic waste is not suitable. "Volatile compounds and chlorine can also destroy the cement's quality, so pre-processing of waste is critical," said Ravi Agarwal, director of ngo Toxics Link in Delhi.

2) Fly-ash in cement

Thermal power plants generate fly-ash in large volume though it is less toxic compared to incinerable waste like pesticides. Over the years, the use of fly-ash in clinker (solid nodules that are ground further to make cement) has gone up in India. Though an inert material itself, it binds well with calcium hydroxide used in making cement, thus making concrete stronger, less permeable to water and more resistant to corrosive chemicals like chloride and sulphates.

Cement plants in India use 20-25 per cent fly-ash in their clinker, though as per the Bureau of Indian Standards, 35 per cent of fly-ash can be blended in cement. "The demand for fly-ash based cement is so high that the cement industry is now starving for good quality fly-ash that is absolutely dry and with no carbon particles," said Naveen Sharma, general manager of Lakshmi Cement in charge of environment and safety.

Cement kilns maintain a higher temperature than incinerators but can't take chlorine

The traditional method of handling fly-ash in thermal power plants in India was mixing it with water to avoid its dispersion in the air. "Conversion of wet to dry fly-ash is complicated and expensive. But plants that have come up after 1995 trap ash through electrostatic precipitators that is then transported using a pipe. If ash is collected directly from the precipitator and sent to us, it will be of good quality," said Sharma.

3) Plastic roads

Plastic is increasingly being used as raw material for road construction. In Tamil Nadu, more than 1,500 km of road was laid with plastic mixed with bitumen. Though the first stretch was laid in 2002, these roads have not yet developed potholes. A 30-km stretch of road in Bangalore and a 1-km stretch in Delhi have also been laid with plastic mixed with bitumen.

According to cpcb, mixing bitumen with plastic doubles the strength of the road and increases its water resistance, thus making it potholes-free. It also curbs melting of tar in summer. Moreover, it does not involve extra machinery, so no extra cost. On the contrary, it brings down the cost by reducing the use of bitumen, says the board. The cost of bitumen is Rs 35,000 per tonne, whereas plastic costs Rs 5,000. According to the Central Road Research Institute in Delhi, plastic increases the adhesiveness of bitumen that binds granite stones. The Delhi Pollution Control Committee has ratified use of plastic in road as a way of managing plastic waste.

4) Feed it to earthworms

Vadodara-based biotechnologist Suneet V Dabke has devised a technology which uses earthworms to convert low-toxic sludge, like that produced by effluent treatment plants, into organic manure. Known as vermiculture biotechnology, the process is similar to vermicomposting of municipal waste but requires special species of earthworms. "Depending upon the characteristic of the waste, it is neutralized in one to three years with negligible amount of toxins left," said Dabke. But the technology is expensive it costs Rs 7,000-8,000 per tonne of waste in the first year; by the third year the cost is down to Rs 2,000 per tonne.

One way of managing waste do not produce it

TSDFs do not completely eliminate waste. Proper management of hazardous waste will require a shift in the way we look at waste it is not inevitable. "Our industrial processes are designed to produce hazardous waste," said Go- pal Krishna who runs Toxics Watch, a campaign against waste incineration. "What we have to address upfront is the design crisis. End-of-pipe solutions like incinerators ignore the possibility of inbuilt clean production, based on the life-cycle assessment of the product."

In India the move towards cleaner manufacturing processes is, however, slow because of the high cost of investment in new technologies and the absence of the right policy thrust. But it is happening. Take the chlor alkali industry that makes caustic soda and chlorine, raw material for many other industries. The process involves use of mercury cells for electrolysis of salt to separate caustic soda and chlorine.Mercury affects the nerve cells. About 30 per cent of India's chlor alkali plants use mercury cells and are responsible for 40 per cent of mercury pollution in India from industrial operations. The rest have replaced it with membrane cells, which are basically a fabric. cpcb has given the industry till 2012 to phase out mercury from its process.

Switching over to membrane cells also decreases energy utilization. Kanauria Chemicals' energy consumption has reduced by a fourth after its two plants at Renukoot in Uttar Pradesh switched over to membrane cells at the cost of Rs 120 crore each. "It required us to set up new plants since making the changes in operating plants would have required us to shut them down for four-five months," said T D Bahety, director of Kanauria Chemicals.

In case of asbestos, a carcinogen, India has no policy to discourage its use in textiles, building materials, insulation and brake linings in automobiles. "Since the import of asbestos is cheaper than any of its alternatives like poly venyl alcohol, there is no economic incentive to shift to cleaner production. There are alternatives within India also like natural cellulose fibre and a lot of research has been done on it, but there is little budget to promote it in the market," said Madhumita Dutta of Corporate Accountability Desk-The Other Media, a Chennai-based advocacy organization.

Eternit Everest, a company producing building material, has shifted 40 per cent of its operation to non-asbestos products. "We are using synthetic fibre for roofing sheets instead of asbestos," said Sujoy Mukhopadhyaya, deputy manager (marketing) of Eternit.

In synthetic organic chemical industries, such as pesticides, bulk drugs, paints and dyes, the solvent can be recovered and reused. These industries can also replace chemicals used in loads to facilitate a reaction with catalysts, a compound that mimics enzymes in speeding up a reaction, that are used in much smaller quantity. This will drastically reduce the generation of hazardous sludge. Solvent recovery is happening in India but not catalytic oxidation, mainly due to the cost factor, said D D Basu, senior scientist with cpcb.

A project to recover concentrated sulphuric acid from spent solvent through combustion at a high temperature is planned at Ankleshwar. There are 40 industries in Ankleshwar that generate about 2,000 tonnes of spent sulphuric acid per day. These are dye industries and drug manufacturers. The spent acid has to be neutralized with lime to dump it in the landfill. "As a result, more than 85,000 tonnes of contaminated gypsum (sulphuric acid neutralized with lime) goes into the common landfill every year. The landfill at beil, which was supposed to last 10 years is already about to be filled up in five years," said C B Upasani of Jyoti Om Chemical Research Centre in Ankleshwar, a company that is giving technical advice to Spent Acid Recyclers, which will carry out the Rs 125-crore project.

Can it recover its cost? At 20 per cent concentration 2,000 tonnes of spent sulphuric acid contains 400 tonnes of the acid. "The cost of its treatment and disposal (neutralization, landfilling and effluent treatment) is Rs 14 lakh per day and the cost of buying 400 tonnes of sulphuric acid is Rs 8 lakh, which means the industry is spending Rs 22 lakh in total. However, the cost of recovery of 400 tonnes of sulphuric acid would be Rs 20 lakh, so they will save Rs 2 lakh," said Upasani.

The project awaits clearance from the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests for subsidy; the Gujarat government has cleared a 25 per cent subsidy. The recovered acid will cost half the current price, said K K Sundaram, chairman of Spent Acid Recyclers.

Many such changes towards cleaner technology are happening but the hiccups about initial investment remain. "Industry only looks at the short-term investment. They don't see that the changed technology will be an asset in the long term. A manufacturer has to be responsible for the life-cycle of the product from womb to tomb," said A G Bhole, environmental engineer and former head of the Department of Civil Engineering at Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology in Nagpur.

It is here that right policies and putting subsidies in the right place can help. P Khanna, former director of the Indian Institute of Environment Management in Mumbai, in his 2001 case study of corporates in Kawas-Hazira region of Surat noted the environment policy must move from command and control regulation--that come into play after a pollutant is generated--to a more proactive approach based on economic efficiency, environment responsibility and societal relevance to make markets work for the environment. Gopal Krishna added that the environmental cost should be included in the cost of the product.

Minimum programme
A waste minimization programme did start in India in 1995. Financed by the environment ministry, it is being carried out by the National Productivity Council and focuses on discussions within the small-scale and medium industries to use technologies for reduction of waste. "There are three million small and medium industries in India with an immense potential to prevent pollution. The idea was to talk to these people in terms of economic gains rather than pollution control," said a ministry official who played a key role in the programme.

The price of goods should include the environmental cost of their production

Some companies did respond. In Vatwa industrial area of Ahmedabad, Dintex Dyechem Ltd, which makes vinyl sulfone dye, reduced the amount of waste water, sludge and other waste by more than 6,000 tonnes in a year, besides reducing water usage and recovering acids. The Centre in 1997 listed vinyl sulfone among the nine restricted items generating high toxic pollution. To recover hydrochloric acid from gases it modified the scrubber (cleaning) system, to recover sulphanilic acid it installed an evaporator that separated the acid from the waste and also recovered 65-70 per cent concentrated sulphuric acid. It installed a drier to extract salt from waste water and a bag filter to collect dried final products that were lost earlier.

The investment made on these equipment was Rs 1.3 crore, while the net saving on acid and reduced waste after cutting the operational cost was over Rs 3 crore annually.

However, a big change is yet to emerge. "With changing officials in the ministry we have to restart building the momentum," said an official of the council. "We pay facilitators Rs 1.5-1. 75 lakh, but many of them trained by us were hired by gtz and other big companies. The new ones demand better pay."

Gopal Krishna is critical of the progress made by the council and technical institutes. They were supposed to come up with clean technologies but have remained a non-starter and minimal budget is issued for R&D for clean technologies, he said.

In 2003, the ministry launched another charter on Corporate Responsibility for Environment Protection. It set targets regarding conservation of water, energy, recovery of chemicals, reduction in pollution, elimination of toxic pollutants and residues. But compliance to these standards was kept voluntary, making it ineffective.

Contrast this with the European Union's initiative to restrict the use of hazardous substances in electrical and electronic equipment. After passing legislation to substitute heavy metals, like lead and mercury, with safer alternatives and promoting collection and recycling of such equipment, the EU in December 2008 proposed a mandatory target for the industry to collect 65 per cent of the electronic equipment. Market has to be made to work for the environment.