Industrial symbiosis need of the hour
By Batuk Vora 

Sometimes one feels that Gujarat is rushing fast to the edge of a suicide spot. Our darling "Golden corridor" has been intensively milking the natural resources since past 20 or 30 years, as if they are going to last forever. Is it not thoughtless?

Pollution created as a consequence is destroying vast residential and farming areas and poisoning our rivers. Our Ecology Commission and Pollution Control Board have been crying hoarse over it. Industry has been trying to build primary and even secondary treatment plants for their effluents. But they are too costly and time-consuming. Only a few units have done it. The late Vithubhai Patel’s formula of growing forestry with effluents is also not catching up fast. It 1ooks as if we are reaching a dead end.

The gulf coast of Cambay gives us rich material for fertiliser and allied chemical industries. We have the gigantic thermal power station at Dhuvaran releasing its fly ash in the air, that can its used elsewhere. Limestone dug out from Saurashtra coastal belt is giving us large cement plants but at the same time allows salinity to penetrate further into farmlands.

The Space Application Centre’s study on coastal morphology has not woken up our moneymaking industrial giants. Geomorphic processes of erosion, sediment transportation and deposition and the fast abandonment of once flourishing ports of Dholera, Surat, Bharuch and Khambhat and Bhavnagar have not opened our eyes.

Revelations at the recent workshop on industrial symbiosis organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry at Abmedabad has a few lessons for Gujarat.

At least 11 representatives of European-American companies that successfully met the challenge of industrial ecology, attended this workshop, offering their excitingly new technology of symbiosis —that is, commercial exchange of resources by various industries, instead of releasing their waste and effluents into the rivers, oceans, farms or residential areas.

Mr Sunil Parekh of CII feels confident that resources of Gujarat can be saved and any further poisoning of our land and water can be prevented with this readily available new technology. An example of how four different industries exchanged their waste on commercial basis and flourished and saved tonnes and tonnes of raw resources was given to the workshop by European participants. A power station processes steam for a refinery. Co-generation of power and heat results in far better fuel utilisation (about 30 per cent better and replacing about 3,500 small oil-fired units in houses) of that district; same power station reduces its water consumption by 55 per cent by the method of re-use of water by industrial units of as many as five cities of that district (Kalundborg) in Denmark.

But the most daring and creative technology — the use of "eternal" flare of surplus gas of the refinery — is an eye-opener to Gujarat. We witness the sheer waste of such flare at ONGC’s Kalol and Hajira oil wells. STATOIL Refinery of Kalundborg reduces this flare to a night-light and consequently both the power station and plasterboard-manufacturing unit of that same district use the surplus refinery gas as fuel instead of coal and oil! Is this not an exciting revelation for Gujarat?

Further, the power station’s fuel gas desulphurisation plant; which removes sulphur dioxide from the flue gas, produces about 80,000 tonnes of gypsum a year. This is sold out now to a factory making building materials. This factory stopped import of gypsum and saved a lot. This gypsum is more uniform and cheaper then natural gypsum.

Nitrogenous biomass created by a biotechnology unit is sold away, similarly, to 1000 farmers to be used as fertiliser, reducing their need for commercial fertiliser.

Constant recycling and symbiosis of natural resources and waste have become catchwords at present in the West. Gujarat or for that matter any new industrially developed area of India will have to adopt this method for survival

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