Tech vision for a sustainable future

From advanced materials to circular manufacturing models to artificial intelligence (AI), technological innovation is helping to shift industrial ecosystems towards greater sustainability.

Apart from addressing environmental concerns like climate change, food scarcity, waste management and other pressing global challenges, technology profoundly shapes our society by opening new paths for sustainable development.

Here’s how Aditya Birla Group companies are driving technological breakthroughs to advance the Group’s sustainability vision.

Bio-derived renewable materials in the tyre industry

Making tyres more sustainable and environment friendly has for long been a favourite cause for the tyre industry. As an ardent practitioner of sustainable development, Birla Carbon, the Group’s carbon black manufacturing arm, has taken several steps in this direction.

A long-term goal for tyre companies has been to increase the amount of renewable raw materials such as nanocellulose in tyres, with the added riders that fuel efficiency and ride quality should continue to improve.

The use of nanocellulose in rubber goods and tires has been the subject of R&D for several years. The challenge for the industry has been to ensure that hydrophilic nanocellulose is effectively dispersed into hydrophobic rubber formulations. (Simply put, hydrophilic is a tendency to mix with water, whereas hydrophobic is a tendency to repel water).

Smooth ride

This is the large speedbump that Birla Carbon and GranBio technologies have rolled past. Birla Carbon’s partnership with GranBio Technologies has introduced a patent-pending NDC (Nanocellulose Dispersion Composite) rubber masterbatch for qualification by tyre and rubber companies.

This has been done by combining carbon black and nanocellulose to improve the performance and sustainability profile of tyres. The benefits of this technology include:

• Increased share of renewable, bio-derived raw materials in tyres 
• Lower tyre rolling resistance and higher fuel economy 
• Improved tyre properties and performance 
• The breakthrough is a big step forward for the tyre and rubber industry.

AI to enhance customer engagement

From back office work to front office decisions, artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming the preferred tool for gaining a competitive edge. During the Covid lockdown, AI delivered added benefits at Aditya Birla Sun Life AMC, which launched voice-based services for its investors with Google Assistant.  (Aditya Birla Sun Life AMC is the investment manager for Aditya Birla Sun Life Mutual Fund and a subsidiary of Aditya Birla Capital Limited, a non-banking financial services’ conglomerate).

Aditya Birla Sun Life AMC’s Google voice assistant uses the latest in AI and NLP (Natural Language Processing) to provide customers with a simple conversational experience in managing service requests and answering queries. In its Google Assistant implementation, the fund house has focused on an investor’s common service needs.

Customer-friendly apps

The fund house also uses email, chat bot, WhatsApp and various mobile apps for investors and partners and a video e-KYC system that has helped onboard several new investors to the mutual fund industry. In addition, customer-focused apps such as ‘Active Account’ and ‘FinGo’, and partner-focused tech innovations such as ‘Partner Portal’ and ‘Partner App’ have helped Aditya Birla Capital transition the service experience to a higher level.

These cutting-edge tech initiatives have helped the mutual fund to get closer to the customer despite the constraints caused by the pandemic.

Making polymers recyclable

A thermosetting polymer or thermoset is a polymer that irreversibly becomes hard when heated. Despite its superior performance compared to the other types of polymers, thermosets are non-recyclable. This makes them less environmental-friendly than thermoplastics. Because of this background, a scalable technology that could make the thermosets recyclable has been a sought-after development in the materials science field.

This is where Aditya Birla Chemicals’ Advanced Materials business has stepped up by pioneering a path-breaking technology called Recyclamine®. This new technology platform uses novel polyamines curing agents capable of making thermosets recyclable.

Through Aditya Birla Chemicals’ Recyclamine® technology, we now have a technology platform that makes these polymers and polymer-composites recyclable. This addresses long-standing concerns related to process as well as end-of-life waste management by enabling recycling of material.

Closed loop manufacturing

This technology has given the producers the ability to recover, recycle and repurpose expensive reinforcing materials such as carbon fibre. It also makes composites affordable to mainstream applications like wind energy, electronics, transportation sector, among others.

In other words, this tech helps the industry to contribute towards a circular economy and become more sustainable.

Aditya Birla Chemicals has won global recognition for this closed-loop epoxy recycling project. The technology has also won the coveted JEC Innovation Awards 2020 for a system based on Recyclamine (developed in partnership with Cobra International for manufacturing surfboards using Recyclamine).