AHMEDABAD: With both land and water turning be scarce for industries, it has become a huge challenge before policy makers and industries to curtail pollution from effluent discharge. With an active judiciary and mounting pressure from pollution regulatory bodies, a bigger social responsibility to reduce pollution has become imperative.
Zero-liquid discharge (ZLD) is what experts have pegged their hopes to ensure safety of groundwater, seas and land resources. On Monday IL&FS, Washington University and the Gujarat Pollution Control Board (GPCB) organized a two-day series of talks on ZLD for industry representatives, policy makers, consultants and regulators. The event saw nearly 400 participants from across the country at the workshop.
"The goal of any well-designed ZLD system is to minimize the volume of wastewater at source that requires treatment and practice wastewater recycling and reuse it in an economically-feasible manner," says dean of IL&FS Academy for Applied Development, Prasad Modak. IL&FS later signed an MoU with GPCB for technology transfer. Unfortunately, very few industries in India have achieved ZLD. There are today, challenges related to concentrating on, dissolved solids for instance, on account of very high consumption of energy and high costs of maintaining membranes.
"If an industry applies a combination of ZLD technologies, both thermal and electrical, cost of ZLD can be brought down significantly. In the second phase of the programme, we will be taking this challenge to our engineering colleges, where students will be encouraged to pursue such research," says member secretary GPCB Hardik Shah. He adds, "The technologies include reverse-osmosis, multiple effective crystallization or solvent stripping. A cheaper alternative can be engineered, tailor-made for industries producing a particular type and concentration of effluent waste," says Shah.
The seminar also saw a panel of environmental engineers like Viatcheslav Freger from the Israel Institute of Technology. Freger's expertise lay in ion membrane technology for water and energy sectors. Another speaker was assistant professor at Washington University John Fortner, who focused on aquatic chemistry and the use of nanomaterials for ZLD. Managing director of Findland's Ramm-Schmidt Consulting, Lief Ramm-Schmidt spoke on evaporation using polymeric heat exchanges. Others who spoke on the occasion include Sajid Hussain of Tamil Nadu Water Investment Company, and Pratim Biswas of Washington University who is an expert in aerosol research.