Award 'regreens' polluting pulp mills in RI
After an eight-year suspension, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has revived the company rating program (PROPER) to show his government's commitment to the environment.
Of 466 chemical-using industries assessed, 5 percent, or 23 businesses, were nominated for the Green award. Two of them were once polluting pulp and paper mills -- PT Riau Andalan Pulp and Paper (RAPP) in Riau and PT Tanjung Enim Lestari in South Sumatra. The Jakarta Post's Ridwan Max Sijabat spoke to RAPP management in Jakarta recently.
Wherever you go in this planet, pulp and paper mills pollute the environment. Even companies in Finland and Sweden that have long applied environmentally friendly technology in the industry, still have problems minimizing the negative impact of their waste.
The problem of paper is a classic tug-of-war between the environment and development. Human beings need a healthy environment to live in, they also depend on an increasingly mechanized society, still much of it paper-driven.
Even in this increasingly Internet-based information age, newspapers still deliver the news and paper continues to store important data. Women still need paper products for menstruation and babies still need nappies, while tissues are a normal part of homes, restaurants and offices. Cardboard also continues to rule in packaging.
This huge world demand for paper has encouraged industrialists here to invest in the paper industry at an historically high cost to the environment.
Since the New Order era, the government has given hundreds of concessions in millions of hectares of forests in Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi and Papua to the industry, making Indonesia one of the biggest world suppliers of pulp and paper products. The presence of thousands of pulp and paper mills here has led to the disappearance of the country's virgin rain forests and helps fuel widespread illegal logging in conservation parks and other protected forests.
Asia Pacific Resources International Holding Ltd. (APRIL), a giant pulp and paper producer, operates two plants in Sumatra with 70 percent of their products exported to Asia, Europe and United States. Its two mills are PT Toba Lestari Pulp (TPL) in Porsea, North Sumatra, and RAPP in Pelalawan, Riau.
RAPP was awarded the Green environmental award, one step below the gold rate, for its good waste management and its active participation in conservation activities. The mill located in the remote Langgam Village in Pelalawan won the award for having managed the treatment of 50 percent of its toxic waste and gases as is required by law.
Use of modern technology
Pulp and paper mills produce a large number of kinds of pollutants grouped into solid waste, water waste and gases that can harm the environment.
The two mills produce 90 tons of sludge, 40 tons of screen rejects, 50 tons of dreg grits and 120 tons of boiler ash a day, all of which must be treated to prevent them from polluting the environment.
Learning from the experience of its foreign company partners in Finland and Sweden, RAPP has developed modern technology to recycle its sludge and screen-reject particles. Sludge is now processed to become fertilizer or burned in power boilers to yield fuel, while screen-reject particles are recycled to make secondary paper or processed in pin digesters to yield pulp. Boiler ash, meanwhile, is recycled to make concrete bricks used to harden road networks in rural areas in the province.
To manage dreg grits, the company has established a four- hectare landfill equipped with leak-detection pipes to store the hazardous solid waste. The establishment of a landfill that could store dreg grits for at least 10 years was required by the Environmental Management Board's Decree No. 4/1995 on the treatment of toxic solid waste.
The mill also operates modern facilities to treat its toxic wastewater before it is channeled into the Kampar River flowing through the Pelalawan regency. The wastewater treatment facilities have the capacity to treat almost 500,000 cubic meters of waste a day, while the mill produces only 330,000 cubic meters. All wastewater goes through nine processor basins and towers until it is neutralized with the required pH, or acidity level of 7.
The wastewater treatment plant is in compliance with Ministerial Decree No. 51/1995 on the permissible content of toxic waste and acidity and Government Regulation No. 18/1999 on toxic and hazardous (B3) waste.
While there is no control mechanism to ensure that the mill always operates its high-cost wastewater treatment facilities, company environmental manager Edward Wahab said the effect of dumping raw waste into the river would be obvious -- and catastrophic.
"If we dumped the wastewater directly into the river or did not comply with the required quality of wastewater, all fish in the river and villagers consuming the river water would die."
The quality of the treated water was now good enough to swim in, something the firm's employees were already aware of.
"Before entering the river, the treated wastewater now goes through a pond where our employees can swim and fish," Edward said.
The mill produces odorous chlorine gas from the use of a toxic mercury substance in the processing unit, but this is now incinerated and neutralized before being released into the air.
Edward said all emissions and affluent produced by the mill's operation were measured to comply with external standards and were checked regularly once every three months by the government. The mills are also closely monitored by environmental non- governmental organizations and educational institutions in the province.
"The mill is equipped with an extensive system of electrostatic precipitators that capture and prevent particles from entering the air. Malodorous gases are collected and incinerated either in the recovery boiler or in the lime kiln," he said.
Sustainability's the buzzword
Sukamto Tanoto, owner of the Raja Garuda Mas Group, a member of the consortium operating the mill, said the international market would not buy the company's products if the mills did not comply with domestic and international environmental requirements in its operation.
He underlined that the group's integrated pulp and paper mills were equipped with the best available technology, self-sufficient in energy generation and benchmarked against the world's best.
Certified ISO 9001 and ISO 14001, and with a capacity of producing two million tons of paper products a year, the mill has applied modern technology to produce environmentally friendly products and no longer uses its old polluting machinery, long scrapped in developed countries.
However, things weren't always so clean. Edward acknowledges that the environmental problems caused by the consortium's pulp and paper mill PT Toba Pulp Lestari (TPL) in North Sumatra during the New Order era were good lessons for RAPP on how not to run its operation.
Entering the reform era, there was less chance for polluting factories to ignore environmental requirements, he said.
"Technology and political commitment, in fact, can harmonize (economic) development with the environment. Sustainability allows us to achieve advancements and to minimize waste that could harm the environment and human life."
TPL, previously known as PT Inti Indorayon Utama, caused bloody conflict between authorities and locals in North Sumatra in the 1990s after its activities polluted the environment and poisoned public health and economic growth.
To show its strong commitment to the environment, the mill partnered with the Worldwide Fund of Nature has actively participated in conservation initiatives at the Tesso Nilo National Park, has rejected the supply of logs from outside of its concessionaire forests and carried out a community development program to empower the local economy.
Riau has several vast areas of rain forest that are home to rich biodiversity, including rare protected animals such as elephants, Sumatran tigers, rhinos and birds. These animals' habitats have been under threat because of illegal logging, poaching and the extensive conversion of forests into palm oil plantations and farmland.
RAPP public relations manager Troy Pantow said the company had allocated Rp 32 billion (US$3.2 million) annually to support the integrated farming system for farmers, provide vocational training for job-seekers, help small- and medium-scale enterprises (SME) in the province and finance the community fiber farm program.
"Besides this, the management has also given priority to locals to work in the mills and its concession forests, a policy which is part of the community development program to empower locals," he said. The company also won an award on Monday from the Corporate Forum for Community Development (CFCD) for its community program in Riau.
Troy said the Tanoto Foundation supported by the company had long given education scholarships to talented students in Riau and North Sumatra to help improve the quality of human resources there.