As a company, we are acutely aware of our resource footprint and make every effort to conserve the natural resources our beautiful country is blessed with. One such key progressive step we have taken in this area is the implementation of a Waste Water Recycling Programme at TOKYO SUPERMIX Ready-Mixed Concrete plants, developed by one of our own plant managers who studied the problem and came up with a practical solution. This waste water recycling programme, part of a comprehensive Production Waste Management Plan, is currently deployed at four plants in Trincomalee, Kandy, Meethotamulla & Peliyagoda, with plans to roll out across all RMC plants around the island.
On average a concrete batching plant consumes over 30,000 litres of water on a daily basis, for aggregate wetting, concrete mixing and to wash the inbuilt tanks of transportation truck mixers after unloading. This amounts to a total of 66 Million litres of water a year, based on average consumption patterns across 11 plants around 200 working days of the year. At least 20% of this fresh water consumed in the process automatically becomes waste water.
Having identified this as a key area the needs improvement in our internal resource usage, we implemented the widely used ‘soakage pit method’ to recycle water. With the deployment of this inhouse-developed waste water management system we were able to reuse 90% of the water, which is approximately 12 Million litres annually for concrete mixing while the remainder is used in the washing process in a close-looped cycle. This has resulted in significant reductions in the consumption of fresh water, making a great improvement in our environmental footprint while saving millions of rupees in terms of operational costs.
The waste management program also takes care of solid waste generated in the form of concrete and cement sludge, and the concrete samples used for various testing that gets recycled to produce Reef Balls that are used in our Coral Reef Rehabilitation programme.
