Over the past 20 years, Non Government Organisations (NGOs) have moved from the welfare sector to the field of development. They have now taken the next big step towards community investment with business partners. This means working actively with private businesses and local governments to carry out activities that benefit both. It entails addressing environmental problems, promoting waste management and the use of clean technology and reducing pollution. Following are the case studies (wherein Development Alternatives (DA) was the NGO partner) that illustrate the potential of these partnerships in promoting sustainable industrial environment management practices.
 
The US-AEP Program
The NGO-Business Environment Partnership was conceived in 1994 as an alternative to the traditional antagonism of pro-environment versus pro-business sector. The NGO- Business Programme focused on the exploration of "if and how" NGOs and business could work together. It provides incentive grants to Asian NGOs to promote their collaboration with private businesses and local governments to address environmental problems and reduce pollution. The main expectations of the grant programme were to:

n strengthen the capacity of the Asian NGOs to work co-operatively with industry;
n enhance awareness about the potential for integrating the practices to improve the  
    work place environment with profitable business practices; and
n encourage sharing of strategies among NGOs.

 Table I : Avoidable Financial Losses in a Typical Nickel Plating Unit

Waste Minimisation in Electroplat-ing Sector
With the support from US-AEP and The Asia Foundation, Development Alternatives has established a partnership with Anand Parbat Industry Association in Delhi to demonstrate cleaner production practices in selected electroplating units to facilitate further adoption of these technologies by the industrial units at Anand Parbat.
 
The approach
After a careful survey of several units, DA selected representative units of Nickel-Chromium and Zinc-Cyanide to demonstrate the techno-economic feasibility and environmental viability of various cleaner-production options.
 
Detailed unit level audits were conducted to pinpoint the lapses in production practices that were the main cause of financial losses to the units (Table I).

Table II – Techno-economic feasibility of few selected options in a Nickel-Chromium unit

For each of the potential losses, prevention options were identified and the techno-economic feasibility was worked out before demonstrating some viable options in the selected units (Table II).
 
Following the best practice demonstration, DA is further disseminating the information to the other units in Anand Parbat industrial area and also to the units outside Delhi, such as Hyderabad and Ludhiana, with the help of industrial associations in these cities. DA is also providing training programmes to shop-floor workforce and lectures to urban environmental managers.
 
US-AEP has selected DA-Anand Parbat partnership as one of the 9 flagship projects out of the 51 projects that it has supported across Asia-Pacific. Recently, all the nine flag-ship project leaders from Thailand, Philippines, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Indonesia, Taiwan, etc., met at Bangkok and formed the Asia-working group to further promote such efforts through sharing, exchange visits and joint initiatives. Several experience-sharing initiatives have already begun in all these countries. For example, DA is promoting ‘green’ practices among the Hotel & Restaurant sector, drawing insights from the efforts taken up by NGOs in Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia.
 
Green Business Opportunities for Hotel Industry
In furtherance of the general goals of the US-AEP Environmental Partnership, DA got the grant to collaborate with local and regional partners to work with the hotel and restaurant sector in India. The basic premise of this programme is to rationalise the sector’s use of natural resources (water, energy, food etc.) and reduce its generation of waste. DA has formed a formal partnership with the Hotel And Restaurant Association of Northern India (HRANI).
 
DA has conducted environmental audits in a Five Star hotel to check the solid waste generated from the kitchen, guest-rooms and public areas. It was found that Hotel Industry could gain financially by proper management of solid waste by:

n by reducing the quantity of waste produced
n disposing over- packaged goods
n encouraging suppliers to change production processes to generate fewer unusable 
    by-products.
n eliminating the usage of hazardous material
n reusing items in their original form for the same or for a different purpose. Items 
   such as refillable bottles, cloth towels and laundry bags, washable napkins an 
   rechargeable batteries, and many other products that can be used many times.

The SDC Programme
Swiss Agency for Development and Co-operation (SDC) has initiated an innovative multi-stakeholder partnership programme for adopting and promoting a cleaner technology in the most unorganised Burnt Brick Production sector in India. In search for an alternative clean technology, DA came across the Vertical Shaft Brick Kiln (VSBK) technology from China.
 
An action research programme was started in 1995, financed by SDC, co-ordinated / implemented by DA in association with Tata Energy Research Institute (TERI) and guided by Swiss consulting organisations (SKAT and Sorane) and by Chinese energy experts. (For details see article on Page 9).
 
As India is all set to progress at a rapid pace in the new millennium, the magnitude of pollution and resource-intensiveness of various small and medium enterprises, especially the service enterprises, may outweigh even the contribution by large enterprises. Therefore, it is highly desirable to nurture many more partnerships such as the ones mentioned above to promote the voluntary initiatives for environmental management.