Rainwater Harvesting

Since time immemorial, rain has been regarded as a blessing for mankind, providing it with its most basic necessity; water. Rainwater has been used to provide drinking water, water for livestock, water for irrigation, et cetera. So why not also use it in the sector that consumes a great chunk of the world’s fresh water reserves; the industrial sector. In the city of Lahore, an average of 710 millimeters rain was recorded per year over the past four years. Since any area that receives 250 millimeters or more is regarded as an agricultural land with abundant rainfall, this means that the city has a great potential for storing and harvesting rainwater. Based on this, our Paints team designed a pilot project for rain water harvesting and successfully utilized 5000 liters of rainwater in direct paint making in 2011. We are the first company in Pakistan to utilize rainwater directly in water based paint manufacturing.

The idea of rainwater harvesting was floated around June’11 with feasibility studies and planning completed the next month. With the start of the summer monsoon, 5000 liters of rain water was collected, by August, in small storage vessels on the new warehouse roof. A sample of the collected water was sent to the laboratory for a chemical analysis and a lab scale batch was whipped up using this rainwater to check for any abnormalities and confirm that it is indeed fit for use.

Once the lab gave the go ahead, the 5000 liters was used to manufacture 14 batches of emulsion. Given the successful execution of the pilot project, plans are in order to scale it up next year. The potential of rainwater harvesting during the monsoon season by using a few roofs of our Paints Site is 2 million liters in 4 months alone! So our Paints team is all set to get storing all that rainwater since opportunity ‘thunders’ but once!