South Asia is said to be the home of parboiled rice as it produces and consumes over 90 percent of the world's parboiled rice. Bangladesh, one of the world's top rice-consuming countries, has a large number of rice parboiling industries. Local rice parboiling industries, known as 'Chatal mills', are responsible for huge energy consumption in the rice processing sector because rice parboiling step ingests 95% of total energy and water in local rice processing industries. However, these local rice parboiling industries use an ancient parboiling system with low efficiency and little safeguards against mishaps. In most of the local rice parboiling industries, the parboiling step has an efficiency of around 15-20%, which results in enormous harmful emissions, huge wastage of energy and high cost of operation. In this study, a safer and more efficient rice parboiling boiler (improved boiler) has been designed as well as trialed successfully in a local rice parboiling factory. Water and energy requirement is significantly less in the improved boiler compared to the conventional ones. The improved boiler saves fuel and water up to 43% and 38% respectively compared to the traditional boiler. The increasing energy efficiency subsequently reduces the stack emission such as the particular matter (PM) by 24.8%, carbon monoxide (CO) by 71.0% and sulfur dioxide (SO2) by 44.7%. Moreover, adopting the improved boiler also could save up to 705,600 Ton of greenhouse gas (CO2 equivalent) each year in Bangladesh. Hence, improved fuel economy and eco-friendliness of the improved boiler make it a sustainable choice for local rice parboiling industry. (C) 2020 Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.