The inaugural Parivartan Awards were presented at the Awards Evening held on 24th March 2011, in Shangri-La Eros, New Delhi at the culmination of the Sustainability Supply Chain Summit organized by Sustainability Outlook. The event saw attendance from over 250 of India’s Business leaders, who outlined their vision for a Sustainable future in India.

As an organization, Kirloskar Oil Engines efforts towards energy security have been manifold. At their facilities, the company has been using bio-diesel for operating DG sets to minimize the carbon footprint on the environment and have been moving away from wood in the packaging materials. The company uses use more than 35 % green energy for manufacturing facilities. More than 170 initiatives & projects have been undertaken by the firm during last three years for energy conservation & efficiency these have led to a reduction of specific electrical energy consumption by 14% & 34 % in engines and bearing respectively. The company has also been successful in reducing the thermal energy per unit of product by more than 29%.

Nitin Spinners has a large number of energy saving initiatives to save power for the health of their organization as well as for serving nature.

Infosys has internalized energy conservation practices leading to sustainability as a core business tenet. One of the key initiatives was rolling out an optimized power management configuration covering around 50% of the desktops in their network leading to an estimated 18-20% reduction in total power consumption by desktops. Consolidation of core infrastructure servers like DHCP and file servers from more than 250 to less than 100 has reduced power demand of these servers by around 80%.

Use of the membrane technology to improves the effluent quality and elimination of the secondary clarifier leading to 37.2% reduction in chemical cost and 36.5% reduction in energy cost vs. conventional waste water treatment technology.

Innovative process for dehydrating food products and agricultural produce at room temperature (27C-34C) and at ambient conditions i.e. neither vacuum nor pressure. The process does not use any heat input and collects product moisture as water which can be used for other purposes.

As a measure to protect the environment, the company has set up the effluent treatment plant with Zero discharge system. As a measure to preserve the water resources, in all its units the company has setup the sewage treatment plant to recycle the waste water from canteen and dormitory. About 90% of sewage water is recycled and put for reuse. Rainwater collection sumps have been provided in all the units. After purification, purified water is used both for industrial and domestic purpose.

Recycling of industrial paint sludge to produce industrially useable coating material thereby reducing hazardous waste from the environment. The user industry saves equivalent of the total cost of the paint sludge disposal.

Tetrapak has initiated a collection and reuse system for the cartons supplied by them. Tetrapak collects the empty cartons and sends them for recycling to Daman Ganga Paper Board Mills. At Daman Ganga’s facility, the paper part is converted into high value pulp and the poly-ethylene and aluminum are converted as a composite into corrugated roofing sheets which find a very high market for itself. Collections of post-consumed Tetra Pak packages (PCC) have reached 2570 tons (for year 2010).

Has set up a plant to convert RHA (Rice Husk Ash), company’s main waste product of about 50 tonnes per day into several useful products like Bricks, Sodium Silicate, PPT Silica powder, Activated Carbon etc.

Waste and trims are opened to fiber by in-house developed technologies and reused in process which leads to zero waste and zero landfills. Used water is treated in state of art in-house treatment facility and reused in process leading to zero discharge. The energy efficient process consumes very low electrical power. The waste heat recovered from fuel gas is utilized for web drying. No external fuel or electricity is used for drying. This reduces CO2 emission by 55%.

The firm has pioneered extraction of fiber from agricultural waste and converting it through biological process using natural dyes to finally weave it into apparels on handlooms. The range of waste used includes banana fibers, aloe-vera fibers, pine apple fibers etc., for making innovative eco- friendly textile.

The company’s software based infraSECURE solution aids to bring down the energy drain from desktop computing when computers in an enterprise are not being used. The entire process of energy conservation from desktop computing is automated and is not people dependent. Further the solution is architected to ensure that there is zero e-waste generation as the solution is deployed on existing hardware infrastructure and the pre-requisites for the roll out of the solution are absolutely minimal.

Cognizant is the leader in implementing the Tele/Virtual Presence infrastructure way back in September 2009, over the Tandberg platform. Since then the organization has added more than 400 installations across all geographies i.e. India, Asia-Pac, NA, EU. To evangelize the use of this technology and to track effectiveness the company has formed a separate technology green team focusing on green Initiatives backed up by a separate Video Conference Team supporting the Tele-presence initiative within the organization.

The company has introduced REVOLO, an intelligent plug-in parallel hybrid for automotive. REVOLO allows existing vehicles running on conventional fossil fuels to be converted to fuel efficient hybrid vehicles within 4‐hours without changing the OEM made transmission system. REVOLO can also be offered by OEMs as factory‐hybrids. Under city driving conditions REVOLO provides 60%+ increase in fuel efficiency and 35%+ reduction in GHG emissions and decreases cost of travel by 35%.

CottonConnect engages with retailers to make their supply chains more sustainable, efficient and traceable. It facilitates large scale farm development programmes training farmers to produce sustainable cotton, environmental improvement projects in textile dyeing and finishing, social improvement projects along the entire supply chain and identification of rotation crop market opportunities for cotton farmers.