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Chennai,
July 30 (IANS) Danish pump making company Grundfos Saturday showcased its
first Indian assembly plant in Chennai that is also the city's only green
building.
The Rs.60-million building in the IT
corridor on the Old Mahabalipuram Road has been designed by Vineeta Badawe,
an architect trained in Denmark.
The design has received technology support from the Indian Green
Building Council and the Confederation of Indian Industry.
The Grundfos building gets 42 eco-friendliness points on a scale of 69 and
is rated "gold', the second highest award from the US Green Building
Council, the world environment-friendly building assessment agency.
Only 50 buildings in the world have this rating.
Grundfos India, a wholly Indian subsidiary of Grundfos Denmark, began its
Indian operations in 1997 and today has a turnover of Rs.518 million.
Pump components are brought in from Grundfo plants all over the world to
its Chennai facility and assembled and shipped for use in Bangladesh, Nepal
and to the company's dozen sales centres in India.
Grundfos India CEO N.K. Ranganath Saturday said: "In two years, we
expect to recover the extra money we have spent on making this plant
'green', and this is just from saving on basics like power and water
consumption, not from our sales."
The building has zero water
discharge and a recycling facility, no-water toilets, rainwater harvesting,
garden and watersheds and 25 percent saving on energy as it does not need
lights at all in the daytime.
Temperature too is controlled by an air cushion between double glass panels
and double brick walls.
At night ice is made within its premise, which in the daytime is circulated
as ice water in pipes that cool the buildings.
Parasuraman R., chairman of the Indian Green Building Council and vice
chairman of the World Green Building Council, told reporters that the
construction industry in India was growing faster than in China, at 9.2
percent.
He pointed out that today, in India, 20 percent of landfills that are not
biodegradable are from construction waste that cannot be recycled.
--Indo-Asian
News Service
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