POLLUTION CONTROL IN SMALL SCALE INDUSTRIES

The Central Pollution Control Board studied the small-scale industries with respect to the chemicals manufactured, the production capacities, pollution control measures adopted, the cost of pollution control and the percent share of the turn-over used for pollution control activities etc. This exercise has revealed, the minimum scale of production/turn-over in order to determine that sufficient money could be spent on installation and operation of pollution control equipment to meet prescribed standards by the small-scale industries.

The small-scale industries produce about 750 chemicals, of which 75 chemicals have been classified as toxic in nature. These are further classified into three tracks based upon the toxicity i.e. 12 chemicals are highly toxic (track I), 19 chemicals are in track II and 27 chemicals are in track III. It has been felt that the track I chemicals, if produced in small-scale industries, the environmental requirement could not be met as the investment and recurring expenditure of pollution control measures will be very high and therefore, recommended for banning. However, the cost of treatment even in case of track I & III chemicals is studied with the premise that industries will provide pre-treatment and the effluent will be diverted to the Common Effluent Treatment Plant (CETP) for further treatment. Even in that case it is estimated that annual burden (AB) to annual turn-over (AT) ratio is maintained at 1 to 1.5% when the minimum scale of operation comes to 600 tonnes per annum (TPA) with the provision of best practicable technology confined to physio-chemical treatment within the industry, as a pre-treatment, the option left is thermal destruction. In that case, AB/AT ratio will be at the order of 4 of 5% even with 1000 TPA of production. Therefore, production for these kind of chemicals, even though falls under track II & III, is required to be discouraged by small scale industries.