IPMA and CII have partnered to facilitate continuous improvement in energy, water and environmental performance of Indian paper industry and help them in achieving the world class standards. With the same deliberation they organized 6th edition of Papertech at Hyderabad. We present here the excerpts of the views shared during the event.
.
“There are many areas where Indian Paper Industry can improve upon by adopting newer processes”
Explaining the objective of the Papertech Mr. KS Kasi Viswanathan, Chairman, PaperTech 2012 and Deputy Managing Director of Seshasayee Paper and Boards Limited said “In every conference the focal points are energy, water and environment and our industry is the large consumer of these three. In the last ten years the industry has come a long way, the production capacities have expanded, and new technologies have been introduced as compared to what it used to be 15 years ago. The objective of Papertech is to bring the paper industry closer to the world class competition, facilitate continuous improvement in the consumption of energy, water and environment, identify and share the good practices around the world. Today India has the world’s largest bagasse and wheat straw based paper mills, which in itself is the standing proof of our technology adoption.”
The industry shares its knowledge with the core team and in turn core team share its knowledge with the industry so it’s a win-win situation. And this we do by visiting the different paper mills like Stora Enso, M-real, UPM etc. in different countries. Energy, water and environment is very important for the paper industry and further the regulations like PAT, REC or RPO has made it mandatory to be efficient in energy usage. Under PAT scheme each paper mill has been given specific energy consumption and if you exceed you pay the penalty and if you remain under that range then you can avail REC. This has made the industry to save lot of energy and at the same time become green. Every year we add something to the manual of Papertech, which contains the data of best practices collected over that particular year. The delegation visited number of mills and interacted with quite a number of suppliers and during that time we picked up certain technologies, which can be of use to us. There are many areas where Indian paper industry can improve upon by adopting newer processes like lingo boost, a new process that extracts lignin from pulp mill black liquor and improves the boiler capacity, the mills can switch over to biomass gasification rather than coal based gasification. Opportuni-ties can also be availed in the form of water treatment and consumption techniques, heat recovery process etc to conserve the resources and reuse them.
.
“Green business will have the ultimate effect on your bottom line”
Mr. N Gopalaratnam, Chairman and Managing Director, Seshasayee Paper and Boards Ltd. addressing the conference on behalf of IPMA said “we together with CII are on the job to search out new ways and technologies to improve the performance of the Indian paper industry specifically in the area of energy, water and environment, with the view to upscale ourselves to the world class installations though we have our limitations in term of size, scale and raw material usage. But, despite that we have an ambitious program of absorbing technologies and benchmarking with the best practices in the world to see that how we can grow in terms of size, adopting new technologies and becoming green.”
“It is a very ambitious program and is running successfully from the last 6 years. The manual of best practices in the world will be released today which is the outcome of lot of mill visits that have been made in India and abroad. The objective was to observe and adopt whatever new technologies are best suited for the Indian paper industry.”
“The per capita consumption in India is 10 kgs. Our capacity is 10.1 million tons and we consume about 11.3 million tons as per the official data. Our per capita consumption may be smaller than that of Sri Lanka but this 11.3 million tons makes us the 11th largest consumer of paper in the world while we used to be 15th largest some years back. We have been modernizing ourselves and expanding our capacities, the industry has spent over Rs. 10,000 crores in the last 5 years responsibly and this will happen again in the next 5 years. We are expected to touch 20 million tons by the end of 2020, which is a challenging task. This means that we’ll be consuming more and more resources. Paper industry is known to be big consumer of water, energy etc. and there is a need to conserve those resources along with becoming sustainable.”
“Sustainability is the term that was first introduced in 1991 Rio conference (The Earth Summit) which explains it as the things which we consume today that our next generation does not miss, which means that we use resources but should be able to generate the same so that our successive generation does not face the problem of non existence.”
“The paper industry is the most sustainable industry in the world as per the sustainable commission because the raw material that we use like wood, bagasse, agro residue can be regenerated. But in electronic media it cannot. In the life analysis cycle you will find that at the end of the day the paper is biodegradable. We ourselves have to spread the message that the paper industry is environmental friendly and everyday many trees are planted worldwide then they are cut. Even in India we have been doing this practice from the last 10 years and getting the moderate success but in the next 10 years we hope to get more success. In the long run we have to use our resources efficiently and work towards becoming green because green business will have the ultimate effect on your bottom line.”
.
“We have identified Paper as one of the Sunrise sector”
Mr. R Karikal Valaven, Commissioner of Industries, Andhra Pradesh Government during the seminar highlighted the importance of the word tech and shared the proactive steps the AP government is taking for paper sector. “The CII Andhra has got the distinction in initiating many innovative ideas including rural industrialization, rural employment and many other initiatives. This word tech is a very catchy word means technology; in today’s world technology has invaded every sphere of our day-to-day life. Nowhere in the world we have achieved the perfect technology, it has to be imperfect or else innovations, new inventions will end. Innovation is a continuous process so imperfection is good for us. Today the up-gradation of technology is the absolute requirement.”
“As far as the Indian paper industry is concerned its overall size is small but, in Andhra Pradesh it is strong, as a matter of fact we contribute major share in paper production and another 500,000 tons will be added as 2-3 mega projects are under implementation. Paper industry has been identified as one of the growth sectors in the state. We have planned initiatives for cleaner production for which we will be providing 25% subsidy on the total cost of the equipment. We have identified paper as one of the sunrise sector and are planning to take out paper sector specific policy too. For long the paper industry has not been able to focus on R&D and off late the importance of R&D has been realized and in fact we are planning to bring exclusive R&D policy for the state.”
