Resource Efficiency for Sustainability in Ferrous Foundry - A Case of Kolhapur MSME Cluster

The Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) play a vital role in the Indian economy. There are more than 4500 foundries in India and 80% of them are small-scale industries. The erratic global economic slowdown, has threatened the sustainability of MSME foundries. The paper emphasises on the importance of resource efficiency parameters for sustainability of a ferrous foundry. Key Performance Indicators (KPI), which drive the resource efficiency of a foundry, are identified as: process yield, production efficiency, capacity utilisation, energy consumption, fresh sand consumption, fresh water consumption and labour productivity. This paper mainly focuses on improvement of energy efficiency and process yield in ferrous MSME foundries. In this paper, research result of the long-term experiences in Kolhapur MSME foundry cluster have been presented. A comparison was drawn between resource efficiency parameters of Kolhapur MSME foundries and European foundries. Such a research may be expected to provide valuable insights into the effects of resource efficiency on sustainable development of foundries.