In June (2007) Solidaridad organised workshops in Hotel Velan, Tirupur India for the pilot companies in the environmental project:
- Improving waste water treatment of textile wet processing (By Mr. Nico Groeneveld, Royal Haskoning)
- Cleaner production technologies (By Mr. Anton Kaasjager, TNO)
Waste water treatment
With a high concentration of textile wet processing industries, the water quality in the Tirupur area deteriorated over years. In order to alleviate this situation, a court order which entered into force on January 2007, was published obliging all textile industries to comply with the requirement of Zero-Discharge. In other words, textile industries need to implement advanced waste water treatment systems with Reverse Osmosis. In lay-man terms, this means that the majority of the water is cleaned to a very high level and than recycled in the textile company. A small amount of highly polluted water is evaporated.
Operating such highly complex waste water treatment systems is a science in itself; resulting in challenges for the textile companies operating their own waste water treatment systems. For this reason, the waste water treatment managers / experts of the pilot companies, were trained for 2 days; aiming for optimisation of their existing waste water treatment systems. The lectures, discussions, exercises and calculations in this workshop all contributed to this purpse.
One of the participants complimented the organisation in saying "this workshop is the first of its kind, where companies and local consultants, openly discussed the technical challenges they come accross in waste water treatment in the textile industry, together with an experienced senior expert".
Cleaner production technologies
Besides environmental improvements related to waste water, this project also intends to implement cleaner production measures in other areas, such as energy and water consumption and chemical handling. For this purpose, environmental assessments were performed by Mr. Anton Kaasjager (TNO) together with technical experts of the pilot companies. The whole production process and all machinery were thoroughly assessed, in order to find ways for optimiation. Of course, with the current attention to climate change, working in a more environmentally fiendly way is valuable in itself, but the fact that reductions in energy and water consumption automatically imply cost savings is at least equally important in the highly competitive textile industry.
After the 1-day environmental assessments in the companies, representatives of the companies all came together for a day in a workshop-setting. Many technical improvements were discussed with the participants by Anton Kaasjager. In addition, the participants were very open in sharing their own good practices with their fellow-participants.
On behalf of the whole team, I would like to thank all participants for their active participation in the workshops; particularly commenting all on the openness in discussing challenges experienced and solutions found.
Marieke Weerdesteijn, CREM.
