Dhrangadhra Chemical Works

Dhrangadhra Chemical Works (DCW) has been functioning in the region for over 50 years, manufacturing soda ash. They have used some of the industrial land for dumping the waste and the byproducts, mainly fly ash. These grounds are now being revived, rethought and redeveloped with a few civic amenities as schools, guest house, and a cricket ground along with landscape design to enrich the degraded macro environment.The rainfall in the region is comparatively less and so landscape design basically revolves around recycling rainwater and treating waste water with reed beds and other similar techniques. Also the planting and other hard landscape features will be designed such that they use the available waste material and enrich the soil and water conditions in future. The design uses fly ash to make bricks and other structural materials for hard landscapes as well as built structures. The process and choices are dependent up on concepts such as sustainability and environmentally friendly solutions.The basic concept is to use the on-site industrial spoil to create artificial mounds and land features, complementing the existing land topography, which includes few mounds on site (mounds to the west of the site and huge spoil to the north) and other elements. These mounds will also help in dividing the large piece of land and will assign identity to the parts of the site, thereby also evolving their own identity.Other major elements are informal platforms (plinths) at different levels, shaded with different species of trees. They could either be paved with industrial spoil underneath as a filling, or can contain soil to grow plants in them. They form a base for the natural and created mounds and also connect various buildings placed on site, in the form of landscape elements such as plinths, paths and small parapet walls. Thus both the land features and the plinths will use the available industrial spoil and utilise it to achieve the landscape character.Due to fly ash dumping for a long period of time has resulted into severe contamination of soil. This has degraded fertility of soil to quite an extent. The moisture levels of the soil have gradually depleted due to the use of huge amounts of ground water. These conditions have resulted into harsh environment for plant growth.One major and important dimension of the project is to rejuvenate the same soil through planting. The process is lengthy. The rejuvenation of soil is undertaken through the generation of bio-mass and nitrogen fixation. Plant list is prepared based on the local conditions and all the species used for the process are regional. The site area is big and so planting is taken up phase wise every year.The building materials also use fly-ash as a base material. Along with the team consisting of colleague architects and engineer we have evolved several methods of reusing fly-ash to be converted into usable building material, such as fly-ash blocks and retaining walls made of fly ash filled sacks with marginal amount of cement.