Vedanta Aluminium and Power Business, India’s largest producer of aluminium, has launched a programme to support MSMEs in remote rural areas. The “Waste to Wealth” programme aims to align with Vedanta’s sustainability agenda especially in states where it has presence, Odisha, Jharkhand, and Chhattisgarh. With an alumina refinery at Lanjigarh (Odisha) and aluminium smelters at Jharsuguda (Odisha) and Korba (Chhattisgarh), the company wants to trigger socio-economic development in some of those districts.

The company stated that it supports over a hundred brick manufacturing MSMEs situated around its areas of operations with free of cost to their doorsteps, amounting to nearly five lakh metric tonne per annum. In addition, the company also provides training on manufacturing these bricks in partnership with technical institutes, thus creating employment avenues as well as promoting circular economy. The beneficiaries from this project are underprivileged villagers who would otherwise depend on cattle rearing, subsistence agriculture or would migrate to other states to work as construction labourers for their livelihood. At Lanjigarh (Kalahandi district, Odisha), more than 90% of fly ash generated at the company’s alumina refinery is used by local entrepreneurs in their brick manufacturing units.

All units of Vedanta’s aluminium business have laid down plans for 100% utilisation of fly ash generated at their respective power plants. Besides brick manufacturers, they are also supplying ash to cement manufacturers and for highway construction, building green roads with it, backfilling mine voids for restoring mined-out areas, among other such avenues.

In FY21, Vedanta achieved the highest ever fly ash utilisation of 117% through these methods and is now looking to expand its ecosystem of MSME partners even further by including more local fly ash brick manufacturers into the fold.

Written from a company news release.