J. Phani Krishna of RIECO Industries talks about challenges in the chemical industry and their solutions

“Chemical industry has a huge role to play in making India a US $5 trillion economy by contributing around US $300 billion to the GDP by 2025. This shows a large impact of this industry. Few of the contributing factors are stringent environmental laws in China and shifting of plants to India, ease of doing business has improved here, 100 percent FDI in chemicals, duty exemptions, SEZ and schemes have been done. Chemical industry has been de-licensed and high demand potential has grown,” says J. Phani Krishna, Head - Operations, RIECO Industries Limited.

Krishna shared his presentation titled, ‘Chemical Industry- Challenges and Solutions’ at the NextGen Chemicals & Petrochemicals Summit 2021 organized by Indian Chemical News on 7-8 October, 2021.

Highlighting the micro-level challenges, Krishna says, “Availability of the feedstock from large companies and petrochemicals, handling of the hazardous explosive or the toxic materials manually or by semi-automatically or by automatic machines is one of the challenges. Another is productivity losses due to unfortunate incidents of spillage and unnecessary dusting while transferring hazardous chemicals and explosive chemicals. Availability of the skilled resources at the right time and the right place and one of the prominent subjects is on the environmental protection issues. The primary effect of the chemical industry on environment and lifestyle is due to the pollution arising from industrial activities, resulting in gas emissions and waste water pollution in natural ponds, solid and slurry waste, polluting the soil and much more.”

“To mitigate such issues, we need effective solutions such as storage silos, bulk material handling systems; closed loop conceiving as well as grinding systems. We need a high pressure bag filter and grinding mill design to sustain high pressure during explosions. Dust extraction systems and fume extraction systems are important as well as the material handling systems and vacuum cleaning systems to minimize the wastage of products,” commented Krishna. 

Giving a peek into his company’s operations, Krishna says, “Founded in 1975, RIECO industries is one of the leading project engineering and manufacturing companies with a focus on delivering sustainable and reliable solutions across the globe, particularly in powder and dry bulk solids industries. With consistent technology upgrades, we have fulfilled and been fulfilling most of our customers’ evolving challenges and needs.”