Designing plant scale process integration for water management in an Indian paper mill

In the present study, plant-scale process integration was applied to an Indian paper mill using the water cascade analysis (WCA) technique. Three limiting constraints, chemical oxygen demand (COD), total dissolved solids (TDS), and adsorbable organic halides (AOX), were considered for the study. A nearest neighbor algorithm was used to distribute the freshwater and recycled water among the plant operations. It was found that the limiting critical constraint depends upon the types of processes and streams involved in the integration. The limiting critical constraint can differ for different sections of the same industry, and can differ in different schemes of integration. After process integration, a 55.6% reduction in effluent flow, a 36% reduction in COD, and a 73% reduction in AOX were observed. After process integration, a 35.21% reduction in pollution costs can be achieved and, assuming the average production of the mill to be 225 tons per day, a savings of Indian rupees (INR) 1.73 per kg of paper produced can be achieved by employing process integration. The water cess was calculated as INR 3024.77 per day without integration for the sections that were considered for integration, while after integration, a 41.53% savings in the form of water cess was calculated.