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Bijoy Ghosh

Eco-friendly: Mr N. Sankar (right), Chairman, The Sanmar group, and Mr P.S. Jayaraman, Managing Director, Chemplast Sanmar Ltd, at a press conference in Chennai on Monday. —

Our Bureau

Chennai, Nov 19 Chemplast Sanmar is investing Rs 50 crore over its three manufacturing units — at Mettur, Karaikal and the upcoming one at Cuddalore — so that they are all ‘zero discharge’ units. They will be, from January, according to the company’s Managing Director, Mr P.S. Jayaraman.

The company is spending Rs 27 crore at Mettur, where it produces PVC and caustic soda, and Rs 7 crore at Karaikal, where it makes caustic soda, for this purpose. The Rs 520-crore PVC project at Cuddalore includes Rs 15 crore that the company will spend on ensuring that the plant lets out no liquid effluent at all.

The units will discharge no liquids. All watery effluents will be treated in which process water and solids will be separated. The solids — most of which is common salt — will be taken to Vedaranyam, where Chemplast has a salt making unit. The water will be further treated and used for cleaning, gardening.

Mr Jayaraman noted that the company just completed a Rs 80-crore project for conversion of the process for manufacturing caustic soda, from the mercury-based to the eco-friendly membrane-cell route.

Addressing a press conference here, both Mr Jayaraman and the company’s Chairman, Mr N. Sankar, stressed that the company had been environment-conscious all along, having taken care to ensure that it went beyond the mandatory prescriptions for emissions. He stressed that the green efforts made by the company are not a reaction to the criticism that a non-governmental organisation, Indian People’s Tribune, has been making from time to time.

Only last Monday, did the company release its first ‘Sustainability report’, a voluntary ‘annual report’ on the company’s environment-protection related activities. In India, only about 25 companies bring out such a report, Mr Sankar said. Two days after Chemplast released its report, the NGO came out with its own — its third —report alleging pollution by the Mettur unit.

Chemplast has released a point-by-point refutation of the allegations and has sued the NGO for damages. Today, noting that the NGO’s latest report said that 17 of the 52 chemicals detected in the various samples at Mettur contained chemicals at “above safety” levels, Mr Jayaraman said that 11 out of the 17 were not handled by Chemplast at all.

The other six comfortably met the safety standards prescribed by the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board, he said.

He also pointed out inconsistencies between the NGO’s report and its findings, showing instances where the report alleged harmful emissions, while its own statistics showed otherwise — “patently an effort to mislead the public and sensationalise the issue.”

More Stories on : Outlook | Environment | Plastics

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