...THE IMPACT

The success of GRP depended not only on the participation and disclosure of data but also on industry paying heed to the rating and its recommendations. Before the rating of pulp and paper sector began, despite developing a robust and transparent model of GRP, CSE had doubts about the success of the project in India. Indian industry was notorious for turning a near-deaf ear to regulations and regulators. Therefore, it seemed unlikely that CSE’s GRP would prick the conscience of the industry.

However, on all counts, CSE was in for a pleasant surprise. The relevance of the entire exercise was realised in actual terms when a large section of the pulp and paper industry, acknowledged and adopted many of the recommendations specifically given to each company by the project.

The project is using a discrepancy policy to penalise companies who provide wrong information.

Rating of the Pulp and Paper Sector
The sample All pulp and paper production plants with more than 100 tonnes per day (tpd) production capacity were selected for the rating. The sample consisted of 28 production units of 23 companies spread across 13 states.

The ratings Overall the sector had performed very poorly with only 2 companies getting 3 leaves award while 13 companies were in the two leaves category and as many as 12 companies in one leaf category (see Table 1.1). Though the poor performance of the pulp and paper industry was something that GRP expected from the very beginning, the finding of the rating was totally unexpected and a true eye-opener.

indings In comparison to some industries like mining, which are inherently unsustainable, because the natural resources they exploit are non-renewable, the pulp and paper industry seems less environmentally damaging. In practice, however, the project found out that the pulp and paper industry is a voracious consumer of natural resources like water, wood fibre and energy and during production and disposal stages, a large proportion of these come out in the form of waste. The project also found that the sharp contrast between pulp and paper companies of India and that of developed world is because of the use of obsolete technology and the small size and capacity of the Indian mills. The major findings of pulp and paper sector rating is summarised below:

A mill with a capacity of 33,000 tonnes per annum (tpa) is considered to be large in India, compared to Brazil and Sweden where the large mills have a capacity between 300,000 to one million tpa. This poses potential financial problems for Indian companies for upgrading technology to reach international standards environmentally.

The objective of GRP is not only to rate the environmental performance but also recommend ways to improve performance

The potential use of wastepaper is evident from the fact that mills in South Korea and Taiwan are entirely dependent on wastepaper as a raw material. About 12-13 million tonnes or 14 per cent of the world’s consumption of wastepaper is traded internationally, of which 50 per cent is provided by the US. In India, a majority of paper mills (63 per cent) use wastepaper as a raw material. They account for 30 per cent of the paper manufactured in the country. However, most of the wastepaper is imported from countries like USA as the domestic recycling rate is very poor.

Majority of Indian mills still use elemental chlorine for bleaching and that too in an extremely inefficient manner. The organochlorine discharged due to chlorine bleaching process enters the food chain and does not degrade easily. In India, not even one state pollution control board has facilities to test organochlorine and in practice, this parameter has not been used by them to monitor industrial discharge. Very few companies have ever monitored organochlorine in their wastewater.

Fibre efficiency While the Indian average in fibre efficiency is 32.4, the world average is 52.5 per cent. Andhra Pradesh Paper Mills is only 0.2 per cent away from meeting the world average

Water consumption With 415 cubic metres (cum) requirement to make one tonne of paper, Ballarpur Industries Ltd’s Shree Gopal unit is a class apart. The world average is only 55 cum

Fibre requirements of the pulp and paper sector are met by bamboo, hard wood, agro waste and wastepaper. The amount of land required by a mill to meet its raw material needs equals the ecological burden that the mills fibre sourcing has on the environment. The average Indian mills footprint is 2.17 hectare (ha) for every tonne of paper it produces. Taking the total annual production to be around 3.2 million tonnes, the total land requirement of the Indian pulp and paper sector would be 6.7 million ha.

There is a considerable dependence of Indian mills on government forest as majority of the raw material are being outsourced from them.

Water comes extremely cheap to the Indian mills and therefore there is no attempt to regulate its use. Hence Indian pulp and paper mills have very high water consumption.