A couple of years ago, a garment factory in Tiruppur started looking at ways to reduce the resources used within the premises and make the production process greener.
Investing less than ₹1 lakh, the company - Syndicate Impex - now boasts of a monthly saving of ₹75,000. “All that we did was take small measures and tighten monitoring the use of resources,” says A. Kathiresan, one of the company directors.
For instance, “We used to buy polybags for nearly ₹50,000 a month to wrap the fabric. Now we have switched over to cloth bags. The 350-odd sewing machines have direct drive motors that result in lesser use of electricity. The regular lighting is replaced with LED lamps,” he lists.
The measures were extended to the workers’ accommodation and canteen too. The water use came down from 230 litres per person per day to 95 litres and the food wasted is almost nil, he adds.
These efforts helped the company get silver rating in GreenCo certification and it plans to try for gold rating next year. For gold rating, the entire supply chain should look at making the production process environment-friendly.
Syndicate Impex is among the 20 companies in Coimbatore, Tiruppur, and Erode districts and 48 in the State that have GreenCo certification.
Speaking at a conference on Green Manufacturing, organised here by Confederation of Indian Industry on Thursday, KA Unni Nayar, chairman of CII GreenCo Forum, Chennai Chapter, said 285 companies in the country have the GreenCo rating and the plan is to enable 1,000 companies get it by 2022.
Manufacturers usually go in for green buildings or social audits that largely focus on social wellbeing of the workers. These are based on customer demands too. GreenCo is about the production process, says Mr. Kathiresan.
The savings are from materials used, resources resued, and energy conservation, explained Mr. Nayar. The Indian Railways is one of the institutions that is going green in a big way, he added.
Speaking at the conference, J. Ganesh Kumar, chairman of CII Coimbatore Zone, urged factories to have green as an element in the vision document and to set targets for lesser carbon footprint.
Arjun Prakash, vice-chairman of CII, Coimbatore, said sustainability is also an important marketing tool and several foundries and textile units are into sustainable products and production systems.