OREANDA-NEWS. September 1, 2010. The plant’s Director Alexander Rubezhansky was awarded Golden Medal as one of the winners of the ‘100 Top Companies in Russia & Environmental and Industrial Safety Excellence’ competition at the Conference ‘Environmental and Industrial Safety: Economic Opportunities to Protect the Environment’ held in St. Petersburg on July 31.

The conference benefited from the input of the Federation Council Committee for Natural Resources and Environmental Protection, the Russian State Duma Committee for Education and other Russian public organizations. The purpose of the competition is to raise environmental awareness in the Russian business community, form a public concept of environmental and social liability for environmental protection and minimize an adverse impact on the environment.

The golden medal awarded at the competition is a strong evidence of public credence of CJSC Lipetskcement in environmental protection and safe production management.

To qualify for the ‘100 Top Russian Companies List’ CJSC Lipetskcement pursued a strategy of continuous investment and caring attitude towards the environment. Only in the period between 2005 and 2009 the plant invested in environment protection as much as RUR 418 million.

Over that period the company had performed upgrade work on electric precipitators on all rotating kilns which included installation of additional high-capacity dust collecting elements, advanced power units and automation controls for precipitator hardware which cuts by 50% a maximum one-off dust discharge from certain sources. A total of eleven bulk railcar/truck loading cement stations had been put into operation. New loading systems permit backflow of collected dust for loading. An Austrian made burner Uniterm Cemkon and a fixed gas detector recently installed on rotating kiln No. 3 ensure combustion efficiency and reduces off-gas content in contaminants released in the air. The company had built and launched a new paper bag production line complete with three advanced dust collecting units. Moreover, with two obsolete bagging units phased out of production, released dust concentrations had dropped to 20 mg/nm3.

When put in place the above environmental measures has allowed the company to cut down emissions of specific contaminants per ton of production to 5.2 in 2009 from 11.6 in 2005.

In the fist half year of 2010 work continued under the Technical Upgrade Program to equip the plant laboratory with advanced controls, to upgrade and maintain de-dusting equipment/rotating kiln aspiration and vacuum systems, to outfit waste collection points and to improve environmental equipment control systems.

CJSC Lipetskcement is the largest cement producer in Lipetsk Oblast operating as part of EUROCEMENT Group, an international vertically integrated holding company. EUROCEMENT Group is a leader in the Russian construction materials market and a key supplier for the Russian construction sector.