Press note of the Institute for Solid Waste Research & Ecological Banlance for the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction

Disasters are either God-made or manmade incidents to cause havoc to humans and their wealth, posing great challenge to Governments with massive dent on fiscal health. Disasters are aftermath of certain large scale industrial operations based on the logistics of their process, byproducts, emissions etc.

Coal based thermal power plants belch out large volumes of fly ash which is nothing but the clayish residue upon the combustion of coal. Based on Indian coal quality, each 1000 MW plant generates over 1.50 million tons of fly ash as the byproduct which is stored in ash ponds developed adjoining to the plants. It may be recalled that over 76 major disasters took place in India during 2010-20 due to breaching of ash ponds damaging crops, inundating villages and causing property loss as well as human loss, as reported in the Compendium of disasters, environmental and health risks of Coal Ash in India.

Thus fly ash is the most hazardous disaster-proned product and the only befitting solution is to put 100% of its output to value added applications in order to avoid accumulation in ponds with vulnerability to disasters.

INSWAREB has developed some technologies for the massive utilization of fly ash in construction sector as enlisted below:

1. FaL-G technology: to manufacture brick or block for replacing clay bricks with better strengths and durability (Journey through FaL-G Technology: http://youtu.be/pb48YHNhkz4).
2. FaL-G Concrete technology: to produce concrete with High volume fly ash input as complementary to cement (OPC) (Presentation on ‘Less Cement more Cementitious input’: https://vimeo.com/154689400).
3. Nano Concrete (NAC) technology: to produce concrete without sand and stone, tapping the potential of fly ash partly as pozzolan and majorly as micro aggregate.
4. NAC Aggregate (NACA) technology: to manufacture stone-like boulders with NAC and crushing them in commercial crushers to produce aggregate for replacing natural stone in concrete (NAC Aggregate Production: (407) NACA Production and Crushing - YouTube).

By virtue of their comparative economics with benchmark products all above technologies are capable to consume 100% generation of fly ash, minimsing or avoiding their dumping into ponds thereby preventing the occurrence of disasters rather than mitigation. Moreover, all of them do comply with the goals of sustainable development to remarkable levels and hence branded as E4 technologies serving Ecology-Environment-Economy-Empowerment.

United Nations office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) supports global efforts to avoid or at least mitigate their occurrence as well as enhance ability to cope up with disasters. Asian Disaster Preparedness Centre (ADPC), established in 1986 with headquarters at Bangkok, Thailand, works in this direction and Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry (FICCI) from India do support these initiatives. SARTHI (Strengthening and Amplifying Resilience Through Innovation) initiative is launched in Feb-2022 and spearheaded by the FICCI and ADPC to amplify diverse innovations in India with a focus on disaster and pandemic preparedness.

INSWAREB is showcasing its technologies in this event so that needy countries could adopt and practice them in order to prevent ash based disasters.