Environmental sustainability – thermal renewable energy

Thermal energy contributes around 50% to the total energy requirement of our sites as the same is widely used in our manufacturing facilities, labs and offices, in a variety of forms such as boilers, stream, sterilization, and treatment plants etc. The thermal energy demand of our manufacturing sites ranges from 25 GWh to 250 GWh per annum. Natural gas and diesel are the two major sources of thermal energy generation at our sites, contributing significantly to our unsolved source of carbon emissions. We are therefore looking for scalable and reliable alternatives to natural gas, diesel, and other carbon-generation sources to produce thermal energy. This new alternative must act as good source of thermal energy – with no carbon emissions associated with fossil fuel combustion. The solution must be implementable to existing equipment (e.g. boilers) with ease.

Market transformation towards Sustainable Palm Oil in India

In spite of being the largest importer and second largest consumer of palm oil globally, the uptake of sustainable palm oil (oil palm that is certified sustainable) in India remains extremely low, and related data publicly unavailable. This hampers public visibility and stifles awareness about sustainable palm oil in India among various stakeholders. Further, consumers especially youth in India are increasingly driving buying decision-making (especially in consumer facing segments like fashion, apparel, retail, electronics, etc.), yet remain poorly informed about the social and environmental impacts of unsustainably sourced palm oil. This is a lost opportunity as far as market transformation towards sustainable palm oil is concerned, especially by engaging youth millennials.

  One of the key challenges in enabling better uptake of sustainable palm oil is price sensitivity in this extremely competitive market (edible oil market) in India. The other challenge is that over 95% of the palm oil used/consumed in India is imported (mainly from Indonesia and Malaysia). There is low awareness about adverse impacts of unchecked palm oil expansion on forests and biodiversity (especially rainforests of Indonesia and Malaysia). Finally it is not common knowledge that palm oil is used across most consumer goods that we use on a daily basis.