Activated Carbon C

We do not publish prices, and for this product a single rate per kg would be close to meaningless — a 1,100 mg/g gold-recovery coconut granular carbon and a 500 mg/g powdered decolourising grade are not the same market, and quoting them against each other is how buyers end up disappointed. There is no public Indian assessment to point you at either. What drives the number is, first, coconut-shell charcoal, which is the dominant input cost for Indian carbon and is itself a by-product of copra and desiccated-coconut processing — so when nut prices rise or the crop falls, shell supply tightens and the carbon price follows. The International Coconut Community’s published series had Indian shell charcoal moving from about USD 329 a tonne in January 2024 to about USD 536 by November, a rise of roughly 63% inside one year. Second, energy: activation runs at 800–1,000 °C under steam, so kiln fuel and power are a direct line in the cost. Third, grade — iodine number, hardness and ash move the price far more than whether you take it as granules or powder. Fourth, whether you will accept reactivated rather than virgin carbon, which regulators treat as a different commodity and which is materially cheaper. And fifth, since 2026, compliance: the shipping documentation regime described below adds testing, survey and booking cost that did not exist two years ago. Send the duty, the iodine number or activity you work to, the mesh or particle size, the tonnage and the delivery point, and we will quote landed against the producer’s certificate of analysis.

No. Velora is a bulk supplier and trader, not a manufacturer. India’s activated carbon industry is unusually easy to see from public sources, because it is built on coconut-shell charcoal and is therefore concentrated where the coconuts are: the Coconut Development Board publishes its own directory of activated carbon manufacturers, and the cluster runs through Tuticorin and Thoothukudi, Tirunelveli, Sattur, Coimbatore, Pollachi and Tirupur in Tamil Nadu, Kochi in Kerala, and Tiptur, Arsikere, Tumkur and Hassan in Karnataka, with units in Anantapur in Andhra Pradesh and one as far north as Ghaziabad. Named in that government directory are Adsorbent Carbons, Kalpaka Chemicals, ABI Technochem, Raj Carbons and Sundar Carbon at Tuticorin; Genuine Shell Carb at Coimbatore; Indo German Carbons and Active Char Products at Kochi; Kavin Carbons at Sattur; Global Ecocarb at Tiptur; and others. That is a public list, not our supplier list. We source from producers and importers and supply against the producing plant’s certificate of analysis for the lot, with the safety data sheet and the technical datasheet on request. If you need material from one named plant on every consignment — a reasonable thing to want, because pore structure and hardness are plant-specific and a change of source can shift a whole adsorption column’s performance — say so at enquiry stage rather than after a breakthrough.

This is the single most consequential question on this page, and the answer changed on 1 January 2026. Activated carbon has its own dangerous-goods entry — UN 1362, CARBON, ACTIVATED, Class 4.2, packing group III — because carbon can self-heat. Most traded steam-activated material nevertheless moves as ordinary non-dangerous cargo, and that is legitimate: the US regulator PHMSA formally accepted, on test data, that specific steam-activated and chemically activated products do not meet the Division 4.2 definition. But the exemption is conditional, not automatic, and the conditions are now stricter. IMDG Amendment 42-24 became mandatory on 1 January 2026. It removed special provisions 223 and 925 from the UN 1361 and UN 1362 entries — SP 925 goes entirely, while SP 223 remains in Chapter 3.3 and still applies to other entries, so do not read this as SP 223 having been struck from the Code — and put SP 978 on UN 1361 and SP 979 on UN 1362 in their place, with a new documentation requirement at 5.4.4.2 under which the exemption certificate goes in with the SOLAS VI/2 cargo information. Under SP 979, steam-activated carbon can be exempted on a shipper’s certificate; a chemically activated grade is exempt only on a negative UN Test N.4 self-heating report from a recognised laboratory. Without the relevant proof, the consignment ships as Class 4.2, packing group III. And the exemptions differ by mode, which is the trap for anyone sending samples. At sea, SP 979 takes a shipper’s certificate for steam-activated material. By road and rail, ADR/RID special provision 646 does much the same. By air, IATA special provision A3 requires a Test N.4 report for both steam and chemically activated carbon — a certificate alone is not enough, so anyone air-freighting a sample on the strength of the sea rule is uncovered. Settle the mode before you settle the paperwork. Three further practical consequences. First, check the date on your supplier’s safety data sheet. Sheets still citing SP 925, or “IMDG 2020”, are citing a repealed provision — and that includes sheets from some major international producers. A Section 14 that just says “non-hazardous” with no stated basis is worth nothing to you in a dispute. Second, your carrier may be stricter than the Code. Maersk’s advisory effective 1 October 2025 will carry either grade as dangerous goods under UN 1362 or as non-dangerous goods on documents, but it accepts bookings only from pre-audited shippers, will not carry the cargo in reefer containers, and for chemically activated grades requires a self-heating test certificate no more than three months old with the laboratory’s accreditation letter and a 24-hour oven-and-cargo temperature trace. Third, and this is the requirement that catches a trader: the SP 979 declaration has to come from the real producer of the cargo, on the producer’s letterhead, signed and stamped. A trader cannot issue it for itself. The safety data sheet is wanted before container release and a vanning certificate before gate-in, for both grades. So if you are buying through anyone — us included — make sure the plant’s certificate is in hand before the box is booked, rather than finding out at the terminal that the paperwork has to come from upstream. CINS, the cargo incident notification system, goes further still and recommends that cargo-management processes stop relying on the special provisions at all. Settle the carrier’s acceptance status before you commit to a shipment date, not after.

No, and this is the most expensive misconception in the product. The iodine number is the milligrams of iodine adsorbed per gram of carbon, measured by ASTM D4607 or, in India, Annex A-2 of IS 2752. ASTM’s own scope says it is a relative indicator of porosity and does not necessarily measure capacity for other species, and that any relationship between iodine number and surface area cannot be generalised because it varies with feedstock, process and pore-volume distribution. In practice iodine number tracks micropore volume — the small pores that hold small molecules. If your duty is chlorine removal, taste and odour, solvent vapour or gold cyanide, that is exactly what you want to buy on. If your duty is colour bodies, humic acids, large dye molecules or oil pigments, those molecules are too big to enter a micropore and a high iodine number tells you almost nothing: you need mesopore and macropore capacity, which is what the molasses number is for. Do not reach for IS 877 clause 11 as an Indian equivalent: that clause is the methylene blue test, and methylene blue is a small molecule that probes the smaller mesopores rather than the macropores a molasses number measures. Two warnings about the molasses number itself. There is no standardised molasses method, so values from different suppliers are not comparable — and on some suppliers’ scales the number is inverted, so lower is better. And the phenol number should be left out of a purchase specification altogether; oxygen interference makes it erratic. Nor can you convert an iodine number into a BET surface area with a factor off the internet. Specify the parameter that matches the molecule you are trying to remove, name the test method on the purchase order, and ask for the lot certificate against it.

It is a question of where the carbon sits in your process, not of quality. Granular carbon (GAC) is crushed and sieved to a mesh pair — 8×30 or 12×40 for water, 4×8 or 6×12 for gas and gold work — and runs in a fixed bed or column that the water or gas passes through continuously. You can backwash it, you can take it off and have it reactivated, and you buy it on hardness as well as capacity, because every backwash abrades it. Extruded or pelletised carbon, typically 3–4 mm, is GAC’s cousin for gas and solvent-recovery duty, chosen because a uniform cylinder gives a lower pressure drop through a deep bed. Powdered carbon (PAC) is milled fine, dosed into the liquid, mixed, and then filtered out with the solids and discarded — one pass, no regeneration. That makes PAC the right answer for intermittent or seasonal loads, for decolourising a batch, and for anything where installing and plumbing a vessel is not worth it; it makes GAC the right answer for continuous duty and for anything you want to reactivate. The parameters you argue about differ too: for GAC it is iodine number, apparent density (because that is what sets the kilograms in your vessel), effective size and uniformity coefficient for the hydraulics, and the abrasion number. For PAC it is decolourising capacity, filterability — a carbon that decolourises beautifully and then blinds your filter press is useless — oil retention where there is oil in the system, particle size and moisture. India has its own specifications for both: IS 2752:1995 for granular and IS 8366:1989 for powdered, and both are freely downloadable from BIS’s public archive rather than paywalled.

Tell us the end use at enquiry stage, because the answer turns on licensing rather than on the carbon, and the duty in each case falls on the seller as much as on you. For food, beverage, edible-oil or sweetener processing, activated carbon is a permitted processing aid in India. Appendix C, Table 12 of the Food Safety and Standards (Food Products Standards and Food Additives) Regulations, 2011 lists “activated carbon — adsorbent, decolourizing agent” for sugars, oils and fats, juices and alcoholic beverages at GMP level, and FSSAI’s active processing-aids list under section 16(5) adds non-alcoholic beverages and sugar syrup treatment. It carries no INS number because it is a processing aid rather than an additive, so its absence from the additive tables proves nothing — worth saying plainly, because the contrary assumption is common. That settles whether the use is permitted. It does not settle who needs a licence: under the Food Safety and Standards Act 2006 a person who stores, distributes or sells a substance for addition to food may be a food business operator in its own right, needing FSSAI registration or licence, and that duty falls on the seller. Tell us the end use at enquiry stage and we will settle it before quoting rather than after. For a pharmacopoeial grade, material offered as Activated Charcoal IP is a drug substance under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act 1940, and wholesale distribution needs a wholesale drug licence from the State Licensing Authority — a different statute and a different licence from the FSSAI one. Carbon used as a processing aid inside an API plant, rather than sold as a pharmacopoeial drug substance, is commonly traded without one, but that is a grey area and it is the State Drugs Controller’s view that matters, not ours. For drinking-water treatment the position is different again and simpler than people expect: there is no Indian statutory certification for the treatment medium at all. IS 10500 specifies the water, not the carbon. AWWA B604 and B600, the EN 12915 and EN 12903 standards and NSF/ANSI 61 are all requirements a purchaser imposes by contract — AWWA’s own text makes NSF/ANSI 61 something the purchaser must specify, not an automatic obligation. So if your tender needs NSF/ANSI 61 material, put it on the purchase order and we will quote to it or decline; it will not arrive by default. One last point worth making plainly: plain activated carbon is specified for organic contaminants, chlorine and taste and odour. Do not assume it removes dissolved salts, fluoride, nitrate or heavy metals — that is a different and specially impregnated product.

The HSN code for activated carbon is 3802 10 00 (Activated carbon). This is one of the cleaner codes on the site. Heading 3802 is “activated carbon; activated natural mineral products; animal black, including spent animal black”, and subheading 3802.10 is activated carbon. India does not split it any further, so 3802 10 00 covers every grade and every form — coconut shell, coal, lignite or wood; powdered, granular, extruded or pelletised; virgin or reactivated; steam or chemically activated. That is also why Indian customs statistics for activated carbon are a single line, and why coconut-shell-specific volumes have to come from industry bodies rather than from trade data. The traps are all at the boundaries of the heading, and each of them is a code a buyer has actually got wrong. Activated bleaching earth is not activated carbon — it is an activated natural mineral product and falls in 3802 90 19 (Other), the residual item in that group; the two named items are 3802 90 11 activated alumina and 3802 90 12 activated bauxite, and neither of them is bleaching earth. This catches edible-oil refiners who buy the earth and the powdered carbon on one invoice. Bone char or animal black is 3802 90 20, same heading, different subheading. Non-activated charcoal, including coconut-shell charcoal, is not in Chapter 38 at all — it is heading 4402 in Chapter 44, which is the same line the IMDG Code draws between UN 1361 and UN 1362, so getting it wrong creates a customs exposure and a dangerous-goods exposure at the same time. And carbon black is heading 2803, an inorganic pigment and rubber filler rather than an adsorbent — which also means India’s anti-dumping duty on carbon black has nothing to do with this product. On method: services.gst.gov.in and the CBIC tariff site were not used, and the heading was taken from four independent and mutually consistent sources — the UN Statistics Division HS classification, the EU combined nomenclature, the Indian tariff text published by DGCIS Kolkata, and the US Department of Commerce’s own reference to HTSUS 3802.10.00 in its anti-dumping order. Confidence in the heading and the eight-digit code is high; confidence in the 3802 90 breakdown is lower, because the government tariff PDF behind it is of 2007 vintage. We publish no duty or GST rate here, because the mirror sources for those are stale and rates move with every Finance Act. Treat this as information, not tax advice, and match the code on your own bills of entry. Source: the Indian customs tariff as listed in the GST HSN directory, checked September 2026.