One drop at a time: How India's textile companies are saving water

As the water crisis in the key industrial hub of Chennai sends a warning for the future, key players in the water guzzling textile manufacturing business see the conservation initiatives taken in the past paying off.

Efforts to progressively reduce freshwater needs through both alternative sourcing avenues and internal reuse and more recently, adopting new printing and dyeing technologies have helped these companies reduce their water footprint. It also makes business sense because of the fast depleting reserves and increasing price of water in some states.

Arvind Ltd, Grasim, Raymond and Welspun, key players in the textile industry, spoke to Business Standard on the strategies adopted in the past four-five years and the challenges that remain in reducing the water footprint in the second most water consuming industry in the country.

That a large amount of water is needed by this industry remains an undisputed fact. An Industrial Water Study, conducted by Accenture and commissioned by IOCL in 2018, said that the textile industry in India needs 1 billion cubic metre of water every year. Highlights from the same report — such as manufacturing a T-shirt and a pair of jeans may consume 2,700 litres and 1,900 litres respectively — help understand the usage trends at the per unit level. Additionally, the water intensity of 150 cubic metres per unit in India was found to be behind the global standards of 25-100 cubic metres per unit.

Abhishek Bansal, head of sustainability at Arvind Limited, says seven years ago the company had set a goal of cutting down the freshwater usage to zero by 2020. “Till now, we have eliminated at least 70 per cent of the fresh water from our production needs and we are on course as far as our target of becoming completely water neutral by the end of 2020, probably even mid of 2020,” he says.  

The water requirement from the company’s plants in Gujarat and Karnataka is 30-32 million litre per day. Of this, 20-21 million litre comes from recycled sources. "For internal reuse, we recycle the water within the facility where it is more of a closed loop process — take the water, use it for dyeing and get it back for production using technologies such as reverse osmosis and evaporation and ozonisation."

The second, he adds, is on the sourcing side where their factories are based very close to communities. “There, we are tying up with local municipalities and we tap their wastewater line, a significantly large volume at a collective basis. We take that waste water in our premises and use that after using technology. Currently, the company takes in about 1.5 million litre of wastewater per day from these arrangements in Bengaluru and 4 million litre with the corporations in the two Gujarat cities where it plans to take that figure up three times by taking in 12 million litre of water per day by the end of this year.”

The reuse or sourcing template is more or less similar with other players. For example, Welspun treats 30 million litre of wastewater from three villages, Anjar, Gandhidham, Adipur in Gujarat which it treats and uses. Similarly, Raymond Ltd’s Chhindwara and Kolhapur plants are recycling 80-85 per cent of the treated effluent. “The plant receives a total of 2,800 cubic metre of waste water per day out of which 2,240 cubic metre is recycled after reverse osmosis,” says Harish K Chatterjee, vice-president, manufacturing, Raymond Limited.

However, the real game changer for these companies is the adoption of methods that curtail water usage in the first place. Akash Sondhi, assistant professor, department of energy and environment, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), New Delhi, says that the added challenge with the textile waste water is that because of the amount of salt and dyes that the water absorbs in the process of production, it is more challenging to reuse it unlike, say, a power or fertiliser industry where the intensity of treatment needed is less.

According to Chatterjee, Raymonds is introducing the waterless carbondioxide dyeing in the polyester segment at their plants. The company is also partnering with DyCO for development of waterless dyeing in cotton and worsted fabric segments.

For its part, Arvind switched to the foam dyeing technology from conventional dyeing for denim earlier this year. “In this, you use only indigo foam for dyeing the fabric instead of dipping it in and removing out from water multiple times. Early last year we moved to the digital printing method from traditional printing,” says Bansal.

Grasim Industries Limited, a leading producer of viscose fibre globally, has four viscose manufacturing units in India. Mukul Agrawal, head, sustainability and strategic projects, pulp and fibre business, Grasim Industries Ltd, says the dope dyeing technology it recently adopted involves injecting colour into the fibre itself which when sold to fabric manufacturers such as Arvind or Raymonds (both are Grasim’s clients), doesn’t need dyeing or colouring at the plant level, cutting a stage of production altogether.

While sustainability is a key goal, creating a pool through these methods or reducing intake affects the business aspect too. Agrawal says that the purification cost of water is anywhere between Rs 20 and Rs 50 per cubic metre whereas fresh water is available at Rs 50 per cubic metre on an average. Bansal adds in states like Tamil Nadu and Karnataka where fresh water can even cost Rs 80 per cubic metre at times, it is like water saved is money earned.

“Plus depending on the available water resources, sometimes there is a supply gap even when one is willing to pay. That affects production itself,” says Bansal.  

Grasim is developing a new technology for the zero liquid discharge (or ZLD technology) and after its installation, its Nagda unit would be the first viscose manufacturing site in the world to achieve zero liquid discharge (ZLD), it claims.

But the history of ZLD and related practices in the past leaves TERI’s Sondhi a little cynical. “The intent of ZLD was to recover and reuse process water effluent. There are instances where the wastewater generated from the industrial hubs is injected into the ground directly which can have catastrophic consequences on human health and soil quality while failing to lessen the freshwater requirement,” he says. Despite the advances made, Chatterjee identifies disposal of RO reject water for textile plants as a tedious and challenging process. “However with newer technologies being deployed the issue is addressed, as we have placed MEE (Multi Effect Evaporation) to evaporate RO reject; the solid waste thus generated is being disposed to a secured authorised land filling site at our Kolhapur plant. Similarly, at our Chhindwara plant, partial quantity of RO reject water is being evaporated through MEE and the solids are disposed to authorised land filling sites and partial reject water is being disposed for land irrigation.”