WASTE NOT WANT NOT

BUSINESSES ARE REDUCING THEIR USE OF WATER AND HAVE ADOPTED TECH TO RECYCLE AND REUSE IT. THEY ARE ALSO DEVELOPING MORE SUSTAINABLE PRODUCTS.

-  ARNIKA THAKUR AND SHISHIR BEHERA

More than a century and a half ago, inspired by a Thomas Carlyle lecture he attended in Manchester, the founder of the Tata group, Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata, started thinking about setting up a steel plant in India. He hired a team of geologists to find iron-ore deposits and a site for the plant. They zeroed in on Sakchi in what is today called Jharkhand, a mineral-rich state. Located near the confluence of two rivers, the Subarnarekha and the Kharkai, Sakchi also has abundant water supply. Steel is a water-intensive industry. The site in Sakchi would ensure the plant would have enough water for its operations when it would roll out the first ingots of steel ever made by Tata Steel.

Today, the first steel factory of the Tata group still stands, much bigger than when it started. The territory that includes Sakchi has since been renamed Jamshedpur after the group’s founder. The plant, retrofitted for modern manufacturing practices, rolls out about 10 million tonnes of steel a year. The rivers still serve the factory well. But there are more changes than the name of the place and the quantum of produce.

At the unit, crude steel capacity has doubled over the past decade, but freshwater intake has fallen thanks to the ‘three Rs’ principle: reduce, reuse, and recycle. A state-of-the-art four-million-gallon-per-day central effluent treatment plant recycles wastewater for using in steelmaking. Freshwater intake is down 25% from four years ago.