Suresh Kaushal, General Manager – Mission Quality, Wipro Consumer Care and Lighting elaborates on the significance of environment sustainability, and how Wipro is working towards eco-friendly measures across the country. Excerpts:
How the company’s “Green Factory Initiative” is working towards improving its sustainability practices?
We have a new Greenfield project coming up at Hyderabad, the biggest plant for the enterprise in India, which will be manufacturing personal care products. The Project envisages to incorporate the best sustainability practices from across the globe. The Plant Building will meet all requirements of the Green Building Guidelines, right from site selection, water management, energy conservation, waste minimization etc., This will also be the first plant with a ZLD system.
For the existing plants, we have completed an exhaustive exercise to eliminate the use of PVC on our products and converted to an environment friendly and easier to recycle alternative plastics. We are aggressively working towards Zero Landfill initiative, which has reduced our waste from manufacturing by a significant margin this year. Every year we drive significant projects around reducing our usage of Fuels, power, Steam, Water and other utilities per ton of produce.
We have also invested in Bio Diversity parks in 2 of our facilities, Waluj and Haridwar to increase the green cover. This year we have taken yet another initiative in terms of Rain Water Harvesting, wherein we want to maximize our harvesting potential across all our factories and recharging of ground water, which would benefit the local community at large through improvement in the Water Table.
What have been the steps to reduce waste generation, across Wipro facilities?
We have had extensive employee engagement on the waste reduction initiatives across our value chain. Clear guidelines and SOP’s have helped awareness on the types of waste and segregation at source. Waste generation is tracked monthly and we have a YOY target to reduce its generation by 10%. Periodic audits are conducted in plant as well as our Recyclers to ensure adherence to procedures and compliance to regulatory requirements.
How the sustainability measures have helped decrease energy and water consumption from y-o-y basis?
Every manufacturing plant has targets to reduce their energy and water footprint per ton of produce. We review the pain areas in the operations in terms of hot spots of energy and water consumption, and look at process improvements, best practice replications and or new technology adoption to reduce the consumptions.
Future thoughts around sustainability that we plan to execute?
Going beyond regulations has been our mantra on Sustainability practices, in line with this we will be working on Projects outside the boundary of Wipro on water Conservation initiatives in the coming years.
Any initiatives driven within Wipro to encourage sustainability or preserving nature amongst the employees?
Wipro actively participates in all the events, workshops conducted by our NGO partners who lead our CSR initiatives across multiple locations proximate to our manufacturing plants. Employees closely follow and engage in these events, which may be related to Health Care improvement in villages or community development programs. These programs are structured and detailed and cover the aspects on Environment as well. Tree plantation drives are held every year to create awareness on the benefits of green cover. Joy of Giving program is conducted every year wherein employees are encouraged to share their old materials – which are still useful and can be donated to the needy thru our partner programs. This helps in reducing the waste burden on earth.
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