By Arun Rao
The Ahmedabad-based Arvind Envisol, a 100 per cent subsidiary of textile major, Arvind Ltd. is a water recycling solution and technology provider. The inspiration to set up the subsidiary came after Arvind set up its Santej plant in Gujarat way back in 1997 in which the company had installed a one-of-its-kind zero liquid discharge (ZLD) plant for effluent treatment of 10 MLD capacity which was then the largest in Asia.
The Textile Magazine spoke to Mr. Dinesh Yadav who is currently the CEO and Director of Arvind Envisol Pvt. Ltd. (AEPL) and who headed the captive power plants at Arvind Ltd. that time and was also given the responsibility later of managing the ETP with ZLD. After building expertise in operating the plant and seeing a lot of future potential in the industry, Arvind zeroed into the environmental technology business, specifically into the zero-liquid discharge technology.
Arvind Envisol began by consulting for setting up liquid effluent treatment and recycling plants. Going forward, it covered the entire gamut, from designing to commissioning of plants. Realising that it was an overcrowded market, Arvind decided to be a technology-driven company and create differentiation by providing cost-effective solutions to the industry, which could have been done with only niche technologies.
Then two years back, Arvind acquired the technology developed over 12 years from a Finland-based company Chemitech, which also had manufacturing operations as well as a branch office in Chennai, which was eventually taken over by Arvind. In addition to buying the Indian operations, Arvind also owns over 22 patents. Its well-knwon PFET technology has now been adopted by more more than 60 plants.
In most of the conventional plants, heat exchangers are made out of high-end metals, which are highly costly for zero discharge applications and are also prone to scaling and corrosion. The scaling needs to be removed physically, which ends up damaging the heat exchanger tubes over the long term and which in turn also increases the life cycle cost. The power and steam consumption too is very high in the case of metal-built heat exchangers.
“The basic design of the heat exchanger in the technology acquired by Arvind Envisol is completely different as it is made out of polymeric film, due to which the capital cost is very low and the replacement cost as well as the life cycle cost too is very low, since it is a plastic material and so is very easy to handle,” Mr. Yadav explains.
He adds: “In addition, it operates at a very low Delta T of 2.5 degree celsius. Hence the efficiency of the system is very high. While conventional systems would need almost 280 kg of steam for evaporating one kg of water, this technology would need just 10 kg of steam – a straight reduction of operating cost by more than 330 Rs/M3!”
Prior to buying the Finnish technology, Arvind Envisol had provided turnkey project consultancy for installing over 13 ETPs in the Indian textile sector. During this phase, the company observed that there were constraints on technology, capital as well as operating costs when it came to installing the effluent recycling system (ERS) in the textile sector.
These three challenges faced by the industry led to Arvind Envisol becoming a technology-driven company and thereby focus on the fag end of the ETP, which is providing solutions for RO reject water, since there were no solutions providers for RO reject water and, in turn, turning it into a zero-discharge plant.
Mr. Yadav explained that if the RO discharge, which is 20-30 per cent highly concentrated is not treated, the company which has set up an ERS is only saving water, but by releasing the RO reject, it is actually damaging the environment.
Now, over the past few months, the company is receiving inquiries for complete ETP solutions rather than just RO reject solutions. To do so, it has tied up with Hydranautics-Nitto Group Company of the US, which is a globally leading producer of membranes. Arvind Envisol is now pan-India distributor for the company.
“Arvind Envisol has also collaborated with another US company which offers high efficiency clarifiers. With the technology called Belt Press, the US firm helps to reduce moisture for the solid waste which comes out,” Mr. Yadav reveals.
With a string of technologies in hand, Arvind Envisol started offering turnkey services, beginning from ETPs to RO to zero discharge. Arvind also offers services to operate the plant of the customer for the first 1-3 years of its installation which, Mr. Yadav says, instils a sense of confidence to buyers of the technology and also makes it an end-to-end solutions provider.
Referring to the textile sector, Mr. Yadav says drawing from their 20 years of experience of managing Arvind’s Santej ERS facility, they are in a position to provide the best ETP solutions for the textile industry. In addition, Arvind Envisol also offers solutions to reduce or reuse and recycling water used in textile mills in the processing stage.
“We offer innovative solutions in segregation of effluents, recycling and reusing the water at source as much as possible, giving selective treatment to different effluent streams. These are the solutions that we can offer and also provide value addition at the designing stage. We call it the beginning of pipe solutions! This leads to reduced ETP capacity and operating cost benefits”, he addds.
Mr. Yadav claims that the technology for treating RO reject is the most economical globally. According to him, environmental laws are very strict, right from the beginning of the late 1990s. “The major difference between then and now is in terms of implementation of laws, awareness among industry and society, and lots of pressure from customers, the media and NGOs.”
Earlier, water was treated as per laws and used to be discharged in the environment. With water becoming scarcer in some regions and costly in others, recycling of water became increasingly mandatory from 2000. Now there is a worldwide shift towards zero discharge, which means treating the RO discharge, desalinating and minimising discharge into the environment.
Mr. Yadav, who calls himself an environmental expert first and then an energy expert, says that zero discharge has to be made more mandatory to protect the environment from further damage.
When asked how important the textile industry is for Arvind Envisol, he says: “Since we are basically from the textile sector, the industry is very close to our hearts. It is unfair to say that textiles is the most polluting industry. Although water consumption is high in the industry, it is one of the most docile water to recycle. However, if there is an end-to-end treatment of water, textiles will no more be called a highly polluting sector, since there are now new innovative dyes and chemicals which are environmentally-friendly.”
Mr. Yadav is of the opinion that Arvind Envisol is different from others in the way they tackle the effluent, including providing beginning of pipe solutions, clarifiers being more efficient as well their membranes for RO being very cost beneficial in installing as well as life cycle terms.
“Even the most efficient and conventionally designed MEE will cost about Rs. 450-600 per metre cube to evaporate RO reject as against Rs. 100 per metre cube in the solution provided by Arvind Envisol,” he explains.
“The biggest benefit of our technology is the payback. In some regions, water costs about Rs. 60-70 per metre cube, and in some regions there is acute scarcity of water. So, when the cost of evaporation is just Rs. 100 per metre cube, over a period of time the technology will start paying back the capital invested, more so if the solids in rejects have some value”, he notes.
Arvind Envisol has also tried to provide value from the RO reject. In denim processing, 10-12 per cent of dyes flows out as waste without affecting the fabric. In its pilot plant, they have concentrated these effluents and have been able to recover this dye and produced about 20,000 sq. met. denim from the waste dyes.
Apart from the one at Arvind Ltd., Arvind Envisol is currently executing a special project at Tulip Textiles, Ankleshwar, CETPs in Tirupur and GTN Textiles in Hyderabad. It has just exported to a denim plant in Ethiopia. Two more have been exported, one for Hungary and the other for Taiwan, for different applications.
In the technology designed for the Ethiopian plant, the effluent straightway goes in to the PEFT evaporation technology, which means bypassing all the other pre-processes which Mr. Yadav terms a big leap forward. This way the technology has also been used successfully at Bombay Rayon.
This solution also reduces civil costs by 10-15 per cent, space requirements by almost half and will need only 20 per cent of the employees when compared with the conventional ETPs. The operating costs in terms of power and steam cost will be a little bit higher. However, 100 per cent water can be recycled.
Arvind Envisol will cross a turnover of Rs. 50 crores this fiscal and is targeting revenues of Rs. 80 crores for 2015-16. Having established strong presence in the South, the company is looking at expanding across India.
On the prospects for the industry, Mr. Yadav says: “Environment concerns are increasing with each passing day and any technologies for liquid and solid waste or even air pollution will gain significance. However, there is greater need is to offer robust and cost-effective technologies. In the case of solid waste generated in towns and cities, there are no major and good technologies available, so we see very good prospects for this segment. The market for zero discharge too has not been fully unlocked yet. This also leaves a lot of room for growth, and with pollution pressures growing, the market is surely going to expand in the future.”