Cow dung, old shampoo, soap, paint sludge and even municipal waste are fed into furnaces that burn lime into cement at the plants of India's leading cement manufacturer, ACC.
ACC ,which recently won the Golden Peacock award set up by the UK-based World Environment Foundation, for eco-innovation has procured more than 200,000 tonnes of waste including some hazardous ones to make cement.
The company, which released its sustainability report recently, has used waste as a substitute for hydrocarbon fuels at five of its 11 cement plants in the country.
"We have a retinue of 100 environmental and chemical engineers to handle the waste that we have been using as a substitute for the traditional fuels," says Nand Kumar, who heads the corporate social responsibility division of ACC.
The company, which manufactures about 22.4 million tonnes of cement every year, has been using biomass waste as alternative fuel. However, three years back, the company realised the potential of the waste and launched a full-fledged business division for it.
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Ulhas Parlikar, who heads ACC's alternative fuels and raw material division, said the waste management business of the company had grown by 12 to 15 per cent during last three years.
"Waste is a resource material for us today and we see its huge business potential particularly when the manufacturing sector is facing soaring prices of oil and coal," he told Business Standard.
ACC, he said, could look at usage of more such waste materials in future and will install facilities for utilisation of waste at all its plants in the years to come. At present, the plants at Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Chhattisgarh are able to utilise the waste.
Companies pay ACC for lifting their waste, as disposing of these through incinerators or at the landfills would be a costlier proposition. At the cement plant, the waste gets consumed in a complex process.
"Every waste has a particular temperature needed for its disposal. At a cement plant, we have the full spectrum of temperature from 1,000 degree to 1,800 degree Celsius. So, the waste gets disintegrated and locked into the complex compound of cement in our plant without leaving any residue either as solid or gases," says Parlikar.
ACC's waste management services get a green tag as they help reduce pollution through the safest method of waste disposal. "We use plastics, industrial waste materials, paint sledges, and processed municipal waste for our plants," Parlikar adds.
"The company even buys cow dung from villagers, who have switched over to LPG and have no use of the dung," says Nand Kumar.
Although India produces nearly 8 to 9 million tonnes of hazardous and close to 100 million tonnes of non-hazardous waste each year, there are only a handful of business ventures that have cashed in on this resource so far.