Waste Management in Electroplating Industry

Abstract

Electroplating is one of the varieties of several techniques of metal finishing. It is a technique of deposition of a fine layer of one metal on another through electrolytic process to impart various properties and attributes, such as corrosion protection, enhanced surface hardness, lustre, color, aesthetics, value addition etc. Electroplating process has applications in large scale manufacturing plants (e.g. automobile, cycle, engineering and numerous other industries) as well as job-work by small and tiny units. Though this process has a long history, but it gained momentum after independence. In 1976, the first semi-automatic plant was set up in Mumbai. Currently there are more than 600 automatic plants in the county. It is estimated that electroplating is now worth Rs 1000 crores and this sector employs 1, 30,000 approximately people in the industry in 12000 organized sectors. However, hardly any data is available for unorganized sectors and it is difficult to find the distribution of production in unorganized.