Posted by : Krati Garg Caspian Climate Conversations | Episode 13
Caspian Climate Conversations | Episode 13
Featuring Dr. Sivaram Pillai, Co-founder & Director (R&D), Proklean Technologies
Before founding Proklean, Dr. Pillai’s work experience of almost 4 decades spans Biotechnology, Instrumentation and Agriculture. His past assignments include Chief Executive of the Bioproducts Business of E.I.D. Parry, Chennai and CEO of SCD Probiotics, U.S.A. Proklean Technologies Pvt. Ltd. is a company specializing in natural, non-toxic and bio-degradable products which replace chemicals in variety of industries.
To tune into the recording, please use the available link here: https://on.mentza.com/circles/8998
Please find below a summarized transcript of this interesting conversation:
Dr. Pillai, you make products for a range of critical but very polluting industries such as textiles, leather, paper & pulp. Let’s start talking about textiles where the environmental impact of fashion is a global issue. Can you tell us a little bit about the types of products you have made for this industry?
Sure, as you said the textile industry that caters to the global fashion industry is one of the most polluting industries in the world. Let’s take an example for the audience to get a perspective – to manufacture one cotton t-shirt, around 2,700 litres of water is used, which is enough to supply drinking water to a person for almost 2.5 years. Along with the high intensity of water use, it also releases significant amount of chemicals into the effluent system which then persist in the environment.
Textile processing involves repeated steps starting from the fiber to the yarn to the fabric to the garment. We make quite a few products for this industry which replaces chemicals used in the pre-treatment of yarn or the fabric. We have products for the dyeing bath, washing, post- dyeing washing to remove the unfixed dyes and clean the garment or the fabric. Our products are biodegradable and non-toxic. They are made in a very lean manufacturing systems, reducing significant amount of water consumption. This leads to approximately 20% less water consumption and about 30% lower effluent load.
You’ve already mentioned the environmental benefits of your products, what are the other benefits that your customers in textile industry get by using your products?
A few years ago, there was a report published by the Greenpeace group which brought to light the impact the textile industry has on the global environment. Another interesting piece of information for listeners is that global green-house gas emissions by the fashion industry, especially textiles, is about 10% of the total global emissions, which is pretty huge. So out of the total emissions of 51 billion tonnes of CO2, textiles contribute almost 5 billion tonnes every year, an extremely high footprint. The entire country of India releases just 2.83 billion. So, the industry is looking for alternatives to reduce the environmental impact and products like ours service the industry significantly. The industry together has come out with a platform called the Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals (ZDHC), developed by the top fashion brands of the globe to evaluate various inputs which go into the textile industry and help the processors choose products which meet the lowest environmental impact. A level 3 rating on the ZDHC platform means the lowest environmental impact and all our products meet that standard, which is useful for our customers.
Apart from textiles, you have made good progress in the paper and pulp industry. Can you tell us a little bit about the customers in this sector and how do they benefit?
Paper and pulp industry consumes large volumes of water and is also known for using very harsh chemicals. We have a few innovative products for this industry:
- Bleach additive: The wood pulp, whether virgin or recycled, needs to be bleached to reduce the colour, so a lot of harsh chemicals like chlorine di oxide, hydrogen peroxide or caustic are used to achieve improvement in brightness and whiteness of paper. We have come up with an additive, which when used in the bleaching process, reduces the requirement of these bleach chemicals. This has multiple benefits to the customer,
- The cost of these chemicals is reduced.
- Using less of these harsh chemicals improves the strength of the fiber.
- Reduction in the use of these chemicals reduces the effluent load.
Our product has been adopted by many large paper mills like those of ITC, Seshasayee paper, Century, in addition to several small mills.
- Odour reduction additive: With the pandemic, the e-commerce business is booming, and you all would have noticed the smell coming out of the packaging material when your order is delivered. That is because the pulp carries with it, microbes which end up in the board or the craft paper which is used in packaging and eventually produce odour. Our product, made through our unique pro-biotic process, eliminates or significantly reduces the odour such that it cannot be perceived.
So, not only do your products for paper and pulp industry reduce the effluent load, but they also improve the quality of the final product and reduce costs. Is this also true for the products that you make for the textile industry?
There is, to some extent, but in the paper industry it is accentuated because the bleaching process is very intense. For certain products in the textile industry, like teri-towels, a lot of caustic is used to bleach and make it whiter. In these cases, our products have shown that the amount of caustic or peroxide required for bleaching is reduced, but the quantum used in the textile industry is not as much as in the paper industry, so to that extent, the impact on yield or the improvement in the strength of the fiber is less compared to the paper industry.
What kind of ecosystem enablers would you need while scaling your technologies?
There are mainly two factors that help us scale our technologies:
- Certifications: For the various industries that our products cater to, there are accepted industry standards and certifications. To increase acceptance of our products, we get them tested and certified by third party. For example, to supply to textile processors or exporting, we need to meet the standard called as the Global Organic Textile Standards or there is another European Standard called Ecotex passport. For consumer products, there is a certification called GreenPro which certifies that the product is safe for the human beings to use.
- Product quality: In addition to certifications, we need to be able to demonstrate that in an application situation, our products can deliver the results which the customers look for.
You’ve got 300 business customers and now you have also started consumer facing business. How difficult is it to convince retail customers to go green?
The products that we have introduced are all consumer cleaning products – floor cleaners, detergents for washing machines, kitchen degreasers etc. It is indeed very difficult to convince the retail customer to go green. In addition, for a predominantly B2B company like ours to go the B2C route is also very difficult because we are then competing with the established FMCG companies, many of them being multinationals with deep pockets. Given this, we’ve chosen to start online- where the resource requirements are less compared to the traditional route of going through the physical stores. We are currently present in all the e-commerce platforms -Amazon, Flipkart, Grofers, Big Basket. We have also started putting our products in special organic stores in Chennai. Our idea is to create awareness and to increase the usage of the product from there. We have found very good reception and have been growing our volumes of the consumer products month after month. The pandemic situation has increased consumer awareness and demand for non-toxic products for home usage.
A little bit on the technology side, you use pro-biotic technology, can you help our audience understand what this means?
Sure, the traditional understanding of the word pro-biotic is always related to human and animal health. Google search for a definition of probiotics, throws a WHO definition which says that the probiotics are live beneficial microorganisms, which when ingested provide health benefits to the host. This means that if a person takes a probiotic pill or a probiotic drink like a special yoghurt, she ingests live beneficial microorganisms into her gut, which improve gut microbiology and provide good health.
Probiotic microorganisms also produce very interesting compounds. If you carry out fermentation, using probiotic microorganisms, they produce, organic acids and many other compounds which are very beneficial to human beings. For our products, we have chosen to use a special culture of naturally occurring probiotic microorganisms, that’s important, I want to underline that we do not use any genetically modified microorganisms. We use a special consortium, a mixture of multiple microorganisms in our fermentation process. This helps us to do the fermentation at ambient temperature without aseptic conditions. When you are normally trying to manufacture any ingredient through a fermentation process, you’ll choose one species of microorganisms which is very efficient in producing that compound, and then you will carry out the fermentation process in aseptic conditions, in a fermenter, avoiding contamination from all other microorganisms, for the microorganism to produce the compound of interest in large quantity. That kind of system requires very expensive fermentation set-up. But when you use a consortium of probiotic microorganisms like what we do, we can do the fermentation under ambient conditions in a very low-cost fermenter which does not require any aseptic conditions. At the end of the fermentation, the entire broth which comes out of the fermenter, becomes the final product. In a traditional fermentation system, after the fermentation is over, there has to be downstream processing, purification, or concentration, to take out the compound of interest. The net result is that we can do the entire manufacturing process with low energy consumption, and at the end of the fermentation, we don’t do the downstream purification step, therefore we don’t throw out any effluent. So, the technology that we have evolved is an extremely green process, has a very low carbon footprint, and we are able to make bio-degradable non-toxic products using this approach.
What are the ways that you track your carbon emissions?
We use a third-party agency to audit our process and calculate the comparative carbon emission compared to chemicals. For example, one of our largest selling products is a soaping agent which is used in the textile industry for washing garments or fabric after dyeing is over. The third-party agency has studied the carbon emission from our process from cradle to grave, i.e. from the time we procure the raw materials up till the time the product is used and it goes into the effluent and gets biodegraded. They have assessed and they have found that the carbon footprint of our process is about 80% lower than the chemical equivalent. That’s a significant reduction and this overall contributes to reducing the greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere.
How has the pandemic affected your business?
In the first wave, when it started, we had significant issues because there was complete lockdown, and our products could not reach the customers. Since then, we have been able to manage, and in-fact grown compared to the previous year and we are hoping to end this year at almost 100% growth over the previous years. The customers have seen increase in their requirement because China was badly affected, so textile businesses from China came to India and the pulp and paper industry has also been very active because of the increase in the e-commerce business, so packaging, paper has been in demand. Overall, therefore, we’ve done reasonably well.
Congratulations, and what is your goal for the next three years?
Our goal is to take this product usage to as many people in this world as possible. We have been predominantly operating in the domestic industries so this year we have started to go outside, we are now trying to market in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka for textiles. Soon we will go to the rest of the Asian markets and for paper we will start moving to Europe in the coming months.
