India’ s economy is growing rapidly, putting the country among the fastest-growing economies in the world. If this trend continues, India’ s gross domestic product will be the third largest in the world by the middle of the century, behind only China and the US. The current population of around 1.2 billion is also set to multiply. By 2050, India could be the most populous country in the world. But India also has huge challenges to master. It urgently needs to fight poverty, promote infrastructure projects and promote education. And rapid industrialization and urbanization are also calling for a realignment of the country’ s environmental policy. Indian cities not only suffer from air pollution and industrial waste, as wastewater is usually discharged untreated into rivers and then used to irrigate the fields, but are also at the risk of increasing diseases. This is why special attention needs to be paid to wastewater treatment in the future. Freudenberg Performance Materials understands this and is committed to find sustainable solutions.
Further, environmental destruction causes high costs, not only in monetary terms but also to quality of life. In its 2013 report‘ Diagnostic Assessment of Select Environmental Challenges in India’, the World Bank estimated the annual cost of environmental destruction to be around 5.7 per cent of gross domestic product.
While India had already devoted itself to the topic of environmental protection as far back as 1972. In
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ESSENTIALS
“ Rapid growth has been a priority in India to date. Overall, sustainability and the protection of resources are only slowly gaining in importance. However, with a view to future generations, we have a duty to focus much more strongly on waste prevention and energy saving.”
– Sivasailam Gunasekaran
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Water management is a major priority at Freudenberg
the wake of the speech given by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to the world’ s first UN environmental conference in Stockholm, a water protection law was passed and a corresponding regulatory authority established.“ India does not necessarily lack legal standards or environmental laws. What tends to be lacking is rather an ability to enforce these regulations and social awareness of the issues, which can be attributed to the sheer size of the country. We need more commitment and initiatives that will continue to sharpen public awareness,” pointed out Saravanan Mani, Former Chairman of the Industrial Waste Management Association.
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One such initiative has been recently launched by Freudenberg Performance Materials( FPM) in Chennai.“ Rapid growth has been a priority in India to date. Overall, sustainability and the protection of resources are only slowly gaining in importance. However, with a view to future generations, we have a duty to focus much more strongly on waste prevention and energy saving,” said Sivasailam Gunasekaran, Managing Director, Freudenberg Performance Materials, India.
Like many other Indian industrial companies, the site is not supplied with filtered water for the production of its interlining materials. As a result, the employees are forced
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