Water & Wastewater Treatment Industry Opportunities & Challenges

January 22, 2011 11:43 am

According to Sandeep Asolkar, Managing Director, SFC Environmental Technologies the market size of water and wastewater treatment plants segment is around Rs. 3000–4000 crores. However he predicts that business will grow at a rate of about 20% for the next 5 years in India backed by the introduction of advanced technologies like C–Tech.
 
Give us a brief overview of your water and wastewater treatment business.
SFC Environmental Technologies Pvt Ltd was established in 2005. SFC is the first Technology Company in India in wastewater treatment. SFC focused on promoting advanced technologies for wastewater treatment. We have had a very good response from the market for our technology and have seen a good growth consistently in the last 5 years. Today SFC is working with all the leading EPC companies in India and has provided C-Tech technology to around 100 sewage and wastewater treatment plants in the country in the last 5 years.
 
SFC Group is the largest Technology Company in the World in the SBR segment with more than 95% market share in India. SFC owns worldwide patents for C-Tech Technology. Apart from India, SFC has set up companies in Austria, Poland, Czech Republic, Dubai, China, Vietnam etc. We are also active and have representatives in 22 other countries like Malaysia, Australia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, South America, Russia, Korea etc. SFC today is the largest Indian multinational technology company.
 
What are the wastewater treatment products and solutions you offer?
SFC Environmental Technologies Pvt. Ltd is a Technology company. SFC has developed and patented several advanced technologies in wastewater and sewage treatment. C-Tech is the latest state-of-the-art 4th generation Cyclic Activated Sludge process developed by SFC.
 
Which are the water treatment technologies recently introduced for industrial applications? And how effective they are?
Two technologies namely SBR and MBR were introduced for wastewater treatment in the recent past. C-Tech (SBR) has about 95% share and all other technologies including MBRs have the remaining 5% market share. Both C-Tech as well as MBRs are highly effective in treating sewage to a very high quality which can be recycled and reused. However C-Tech scores over MBRs in terms of both capital as well as operating costs, ease of operation etc. Though MBRs produce an effluent of a slightly better quality, the capital and the operating costs are disproportionately higher and hence they have found application in niche segments, mainly for smaller industrial plants.
 
Tell us about the C-Tech technology in detail. What are the unique advantages of this C-Tech technology?
C-Tech was launched in India about five years back. This technology has completely changed the way sewage used to be treated in the country. As said earlier we have now around 100 plants coming up all over the country. We have recently launched a remote monitoring package for C-Tech called C-Tech online. This is high-end software developed to monitor, operate and maintain C-Tech plants for any remote location through the internet. There is a huge demand to install this in all the plants, already some of the operating plants have been put on remote monitoring using C-Tech online.
 
C-Tech offers tremendous advantages over other conventional technologies. The treated Sewage from C-Tech is of recyclable quality and the water can be used for all non potable purposes. Apart from the excellent quality of the treated sewage, C-Tech uses almost 50% less land and power. It is fully automatic, the plant can be controlled and monitored from anywhere in the world through internet. It includes various features like co–current Nitrification and De–Nitrification, biological Phosphorous removal (apart from BOD, COD and TSS removals) and has inbuilt controller for power savings. It is also possible to generate power from a C-Tech plant. The capital cost of this technology is lower than all other technologies for producing such quality of water and its operating cost is also the lowest.
 

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