Sunita Narain: Turning the green corner

DOWN TO EARTH

The pulp and paper industry is an environmentalist's nightmare. It can easily eat away a nation's forest. It uses huge amounts of equally precious water to "cook and clean" its raw material, enough to put every other water-guzzler to shame.

To make its product "fair and lovely" it puts in high amounts of bleach, which then emerges as toxins in the equally huge amounts of wastewater and sludge discharges. It produces bad smells and its effluent is coloured suspiciously.

For precisely these reasons, any change for the better is good news. The Centre for Science and Environment's Green Rating Project (GRP) recently released its second rating of this sector.

According to GRP findings, this unenvironmental juggernaut is beginning to amend its ways. The sector, prodded by public pressure, has shown significant improvement in its environmental bottomline. But even more exciting is the possibility of future, greater news.

But for this, its leaders will have to do much more. They will have to bite the bullet, as the saying goes, to really show how Indian industry can be the true-growth sector, how it can break free of the growth-without-jobs syndrome that plagues industry today.

It can make possible the industrial growth model the world is seeking: a model that enjoins the fate of small and poor landholders to the future of large and globally competitive industry.

This is a model that uses labour opportunities in the informal and agricultural sectors to provide true and sustainable development "" putting money and resources in the hands of the poor.

The analysis by GRP shows that trees planted for the pulp and paper sector can provide a fascinating model of growth. Roughly 1.1 million hectare of land is required to supply the required 5 million tonnes of raw material industry currently requires.

This, in turn, could provide employment to over 0.55 million farming families in growing and harvesting wood in a sustainable manner. India could easily become a pulp surplus country if this works.

Then there is the other opportunity, collecting and recycling the millions of tonnes of wastepaper India generates. But for this, industry will have to make the millions of kabbadiwallas "" informal waste collectors "" its sourcing managers. What a grand alliance this could be.

The second big challenge is water. GRP finds that water consumption has dropped from 200 tonnes for each tonne of product manufactured in 1998 to 135 tonnes of water for each tonne manufactured in 2002.

But this still means that Indian pulp and paper sector consumes much more water than the global best practice mill. This huge water consumption then generates huge amounts of pollution. But here again, answers exist.

Remember, this sector does not take away water from the hydrological cycle. It uses water in its process and discharges almost all the water as effluent. Therefore, the key is to improve the quality of effluent so that it can be reused again to irrigate crops or for other purposes.

For this, industry will have to learn that pollution control does not mean building more effluent treatment plants. It must become water-prudent. Then it needs to carefully segregate the clean water used for processing, from the polluted and coloured effluent.

One technology leapfrog would be to transform from chlorine to non-chlorine bleaching, so that even the polluted water could be reused.

Few realise the toxic chlorine challenge is related to the water challenge. It would be cost-effective to reuse the treated effluents for irrigation. But effluent water that is soaked in chlorine compounds cannot be allowed to be used on land.

Currently, the regulations for disposal of effluents on land are pathetic. Therefore, if the effluent of this water-intensive industry has to become a reusable resource, much more will need to be done.

The problem is that standards are made for the country as a whole. In other words, regulations are made without a ear to the ground and an eye for detail. They ignore the ground reality in which the industry functions.

The water standards are a classic example. They are designed for discharge into water bodies, assuming that the water body has assimilative capacity. But with the uptake of water increasing, there is less water in our rivers.

In this situation, when a paper mill discharges its massive effluent, the standards are not worth the paper they are written on. The industry can meet all regulatory standards in the country, but it will still not satisfy its neighbours, who live downstream of its wastewater discharge point.

Which brings to the challenge of industry's relations to local communities. Industry must realise that they are the true barometers of its performance. It is they who have provided the trigger for change. They have protested against coloured water, foul smell, mounds of lime sludge and so on. Sometimes they have won. Their victory has paved the way for change.

In almost all cases change has been lead by public pressure. It teaches us that democracy is the best check and balance for sustainable industrialisation. It is a lesson worth learning.