Enforcement of pollution control norms in pulp and paper mill Uttarakhand
Student name: Mr Ankit Rustogi
Guide: Dr Umesh Gulla
Year of completion: 2012
Host Organisation: Uttarakhand Environment Protection and Pollution Control Board, Dehradun
Supervisor (Host Organisation): Dr Ankur Kansal
Abstract: Pulp and Paper Industry is traditionally known to be large contributor to environment pollution
due to large consumption of energy and chemicals. The wood pulping and production of the
paper products generate a considerable amount of pollutants characterized by biochemical
oxygen demand (BOD), chemical oxygen demand (COD), suspended solids (SS), toxicity, and
color when untreated or poorly treated effluents are discharged to receiving waters. In India
Pulp and paper mills discharge huge amount of waste water and consumes even greater amount
of water. These practices fall far behind the world best practices and averages for wood base
industries as well as waste paper based industries. The effluents from the industry cause slime
growth, thermal impacts, scum formation, color problems, and loss of aesthetic beauty in the
environment. They also increase the amount of toxic substances in the water, causing death to
the zooplankton and fish, as well as profoundly affecting the terrestrial ecosystem. The growing
public awareness of the fate of these pollutants and stringent regulations established by the
various governmental authorities such as provincial and federal agencies are forcing the
industry to treat effluents to the required compliance level before discharging them in to the
environment.
During the course of this project, various experts in the industry were consulted and interviewed
to seek an insight about the various practices, the recent trends in industry, developments to
tackle these challenges, future plans and their take on the above mentioned issues.
In the present study an attempt is made to find out the level of compliance of pollution control
norms in terms of water consumption, waste water treatment, electricity consumption etc. It is
found that the paper mills reduced the water consumption per unit of paper produced, they
established advance waste water treatment plants, they use energy recovery, chemical recovery
by establishing very advance technologies which are being discussed in depth inside the report.
However, it is interesting to mention that the electricity consumption has been increased in due
course of time. The reason is that most of the processes which were earlier run on the conventional fuel are switched to green energy i.e. electricity. This helps in cost cutting of air
pollution control systems.
