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The cleanest one

The cleanest one india will soon be in a position to produce environment-friendly detergents based on zeolites, using indigenous know-how. Scientists at the Central Salt and Marine Chemicals Research Institute (csmcri) in Bhavnagar, Gujarat, a constituent of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (csir) are the people behind this technological breakthrough.

Zeolites are crystalline allumino-silicate compounds which constitutea key building material in the manufacture of environment-friendly detergents. They replace the hithertocommonly used sodium tripolyphosphate (stpp), which is known to cause water pollution by promoting the growth of unwanted water flora in the sewers.

The process for the manufacture of zeolites developed by csmcri is said to be better than the technology currently being used anywhere else in the world, as it brings about cost reduction to the tune of 30 per cent. This technology has recently been transferred to the public sector National Aluminium Company Ltd (nalco) in Damanjodi, Orissa, with the help of two more public sector consultancy firms, National Research Development Corporation (nrdc) and Engineers India Ltd (eil) . The commercialisation of the indigenous technology for manufacturing zeolite a is, thus, a fine example of productive linkages between research, industry and consultancy firms.

The synthetic detergent industry, which has emerged as one of the most successful industries in India, with annual sales of Rs 3,500 crore, provides a ready market for zeolites. According to Ashok Parthasarathi, additional secretary, department of scientific and industrial research, ministry of science and technology, the production of detergent washing powder in India has increased from 18,000 tonnes per annum (tpa) in 1968 to about 610,000 tpa in 1985, while the current demand is placed at around 1.5 million tonnes. "The present technology, therefore, offers an immense commercial scope. There also exists an immense export potential for zeolite a , considering that the demand for green detergents has been growing around the world", says Parthasarthi.

The zeolite plant of nalco, which will be operational in 1998 will initially have a capacity of 10,000 tpa, which is expected to rise to 50,000 tpa by 2000 ad. The first phase would involve an investment outlay of Rs 25 crore, to be financed mainly through the company's internal resources. As per the technology transfer agreement, nalco would be paying the nrdc a technology license fee of Rs1.35 crore over a period of three years.

UP Market The demand for detergents based on zeolites is rapidly increasing in India due to the progressive introduction of stringent water pollution regulations and the fears that stpp may be phased out or banned in the near future.The Bureau of Indian Standards has already notified stpp as environmentally hazardous.

There is another achievement in the same field. Scientists at the National Chemical Laboratory ( ncl ), Pune, yet another constituent laboratory of csir, have found a method of hastening the crystallisation of zeolites by adding a cocktail of some inexpensive chemical compounds. Their finding,yet to be developed further for industrial applications, is of tremendous commercial significance as crystallisation of zeolites is notoriously slow, often requiring anywhere between one day to a whole week, depending on their composition.

Zeolites are currently being manufactured in India by spic Fine and Hindustan Lever Ltd, based on western technology. According to A Natarajan, director of csmcri, "The conventional starting point for the manufacture of zeolites is alumina trihydrate, which is then converted into pure sodium aluminate. A distinctive feature of our technology is that zeolite a can now be produced directly from sodium aluminate liquor, which is an intermediate stream in the aluminium industry.This would mean cost savings of 25-30 per cent."

For nalco, the biggest aluminium plant in Asia, the availability of this technology means value addition for their by-product. "We were looking for a value-added product for alumina of which we produce nearly eight lakh tpa from our bauxite mines at Panchpatmali hills. While the alumina, half of which is exported, fetches us around Rs 10 per kg, the price for zeolite a should work out at least 2.5 times higher", says N V Badi, executive director of nalco .

eil played an important role in the technology transfer by assessing the plants' equipment, process design and engineering parameters at the pilot plant demonstration stage. But nrdc was the organisation which coordinated the entire exercise, conducted the pilot scale demonstration and brought about the actual technology transfer by signing the agreement with nalco . Apparently, it was for the first time that four different public sector agencies got together to translate a laboratory innovation into a marketable product. Therefore, the rights over fully developed factory scale technology will be jointly owned by all the four partners of this venture - csmcri , nrdc , eil and nalco and profits from further technology sales will also be equally shared by all four of them.

Sparkling with pride
N K Sharma, director nrdc , takes pride in the role played by his organisation. "It was a major challenge for us. nalco insisted on a performance guarantee. Before we agreed on it, we conducted 18 trial runs on the pilot plant set up at Bhavnagar, to assess the entire technology. Apart from demonstrating the realisation of over 95 per cent of the installed capacity of the plant, we tested the product from every batch to make sure that the zeolites produced by our process met international standards of quality based on seven parameters. They include calcium binding capacity, particle size, pH, mole composition, bulk density, crystallinity and whiteness index. We also involved eil to assess the equipment design and process engineering parameters. It was with this confidence that we agreed to give the performance guarantee, on the terms that if our technology fails on any of the above seven parameters, we will pay a penalty of two per cent of our technology fee for every such parameter, subject to a maximum of 10 per cent. That is how the entire deal materialised", Sharma says.

nrdc has also filed process patents in India and abroad for the zeolite technology. "Our biggest problem is to train science and technology institutions in the art of technology transfer. Technology development and commercialisation has a lot of aspects which scientists do not normally know or appreciate. What is true at the laboratory scale may not be true at the pilot plant scale, which in turn may not be true at the industrial scale. We have to work hard with them to make them realise what all needs to be done for a successful technology transfer," says Sharma.

The success of this project should serve as a tremendous morale boost for the much maligned public sector undertakings which are facing the wrath of liberalisation.

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