The sugar industry is facing various challenges including deterioration of environment due to its industrial activities. The environmental challenges for the sugar mills are associated with liquid waste, gaseous emission, solid waste and noise pollution.
“Pollutant are inevitable but pollution is not”, hence there is always a way to overcome the pollution.
While on a mission to show case Green Heroes who are giving their bit to save our mother earth, we showcase Mr. S.M.Ramesh - Plant Head of Rajshree Sugars & Chemicals Limited which is one of the largest manufacturers of Sugar in South India.
We all know that Rajshree Group has a strong emphasis on technology and quality as also a strong commitment to environmental & social concerns.
Answer: : I have been associated with this group for more than 10 years out of my 27 years’ experience in this industry. As a unit head in Gingee plant a green field project of 3500 TCD with 20.5 MW Cogeneration plant. I had addressed all the operating issues and automated the entire plant operation with least manpower for O&M. This plant had won many awards for its increased throughput and achieving the best efficiencies. As a Project head, we had set up an 80 KLPD Zero discharge Distillery plant with 3MW incineration plant and have been successfully operating the plant since 2012.This incineration boiler is a first of it’s kind in the industry to successfully incinerate spent wash continuously which has spear headed the technology in the sugar industry. Today many Boilers have been operating in the industry based on the success of this Boiler.
Answer: : We had implemented several energy conservation measures across sugar, Cogen and Distillery plants and reduced the steam % cane from 42 % to 32%. Power per ton of cane from 25 Kwh to 21 Kwh. Cogen Auxiliary power consumption from 9.5% to 8.2%.
Apart from the energy conservations we had done lot of water conservation measures at our factory and operating the Sugar& distillery with 100% recycled water except for drinking water and DM water.
Answer: : We had indeed shown keen interest to set up a Bagasse drier plant to conserve bagasse so as to extend the no. of operating days of power plant or to sell the bagasse based on the viability. However, this has been deferred due to the crisis of low cane availability in Tamil Nadu.
Answer: : Sugar factories have immense potential to be self reliant provided they have an integrated energy efficient Sugar, cogen and distillery plants.
“Nowadays lots of technological up gradations are possible to conserve energy, water, operating Distilleries throughout the year”.
Factories should adopt all these technologies. Apart from the conventional sugar production, industry should develop technologies to convert sugar into a more valuable products like pharma, food etc to augment their revenues.