Resource Conservation By The Application Of Cleaner Production Tools In Mother Dairy

Abstract

In the words of a Dairy CEO, For water use In 1986, Grade A dairies in the USA processed over 60 billion pounds of products. They used about 9.3 billion gallons of milk to make these products. If the average plant used 4 gallons of water to process each gallon of milk, total water use for that year by the Grade A dairy industry exceeded 37.2 billion gallons. Some plants now use less than 1 gallon of water per gallon of milk processed. If all dairy plants could save 3 gallons of water per gallon of milk processed, savings would amount to approximately 28 billion gallons of water enough to supply a city of 200,000 people for a year. For waste Load The average Grade A dairy plant produces 5 pounds of B0D5 per thousand pounds of milk processed. The resulting annual BOD5 load from dairy processing is almost 400 million pounds. Some plants discharge as little as 1 pound of BOD5 per thousand pounds of milk processed. If all plants reduced their discharge to this level, about 320 million pounds of BOD5 could be eliminated, which is the same amount discharged annually from a city of 5.2 million people. With the above background and insight, the presented work was initiated with an aim to realize the savings in terms of pollution & resource consumption in a real multi-product dairy (Mother Dairy, Gandhinagar) as to upgrade the overall status of the organization as well as to serve the society by cutting down the pollution from the industry. Along the lines of Cleaner Production, the concept of Waste minimizing practices has been used for the objective of resource conservation in a multi-product dairy. The presented work is an effort to bring in the importance of resource conservation to the industries, the applicability of CP tools to dairy industries and the importance of waste minimization in any endeavor of this kind. IV With the commitment of the dairy management and the intervention of academicians the scenario of resource consumption has improved a lot which can be understood with the following figures: · Recovery of about 200 kg fat/day · Reduction of pollution load by 270 kg/day BOD · Monetary saving of about 72 lakh Rs. /Year With these concrete results from the project the dairy management is quite inspired and is willing to achieve excellence at every front. The dairy almost has achieved 1:1 ratio in milk received and water consumed and is still working for excellence. At the organic load front, the picture is a bit gloomy but their efforts are definitely on with the philosophy of reducing the pollution at the source with the help of Cleaner Production. So as a conclusion, a target on the basis of observations and analysis has been furnished along with the recommendations for the continuous improvement of the organization. In addition to this a strategy is been proposed to bolster the MIS of MDG and a dialogue has been initiated to continue this project as an endeavor to aim at ZERO DISCHARGE. The Dairy management has responded very positively to the proposal and it is already in process.