Textile units using good bacteria to battle pollution

Even as industries in Vadodara GIDC face closure due to poor effluent treatments, they can perhaps look at the good bacteria to come to their rescue. A Chennai-based company’s products is being used by several textile units in Ahmedabad and Gujarat to help them battle pollution and reduce the level of chemicals in their effluent.

Proklean Technologies makes eco-friendly products for industries like textile, leather and paper that otherwise depend on heavy chemicals for a substantial portion of their production process.

The products developed by the start-up replaces chemical products with those that are biodegradable and non-toxic. The company has developed a proprietary technology platform to achieve this. The technology makes use of probiotic microorganisms (beneficial bacteria) to make its products.

Dr Sivaram Pillai, CEO, Proklean said that in many industries Proklean’s products have helped replace at least 10 per cent to 15 per cent of the chemical products used earlier. It is developing more products and aims to cover as high as 50 per cent of the chemicals used in some industries. “With this, the overall input of chemical in an industry has come down and this has an automatic impact on the effluent being generated,” said Dr Pillai. Giving an example, he said the first process in any textile industry is washing and cleaning the raw material. “Earlier only chemical products were used to clean this but we have developed cleaning products that are non-toxic and biodegradable and environmentally friendly. This considerably reduces the pollutants being generated from stage one of the production process,” said Dr Pillai. He said another advantage of the products was that it resulted in saving water up to 20 per cent compared to chemical products and this alone was a substantial saving.