OREANDA-NEWS. September 11, 2013. A delegation comprising Finnmark province (Norway) business, education and environment control officers visited Kola MMC melting shop. The Company arranged the visit to the facility at the request of Norwegians in a one day acquaintance tour to the Pasvik natural reserve.

In the opinion of Mikhail Shkondin, chief of ecological safety section of MMC Kola, the open doors attitude of the Company is a sine qua non principle of our environmental policy. We are sure that this attitude has a positive response with our neighbors  and facilitates a more practical dialog.

Nickel municipality melting shop is the most important link in the Kola MMC technological chain producing matte to be further transformed in Monchegorsk into the core products – nickel and copper.

The Norwegian guests walked round converter-melting section and registered some results of the shop’s upgrades aiming at reduction of disorganized exhausts and decrease of environmental pollution. As said Vartan Mazmanyan, chief of the melting shop, in order to fulfill this task, the Company has worked out and brings to life multiple and special technological programs, comprehending aspiration covers for convertors, reconstructed loading systems of ore-thermal furnaces and automated control systems for gas escapes from convertors.

Only in the past three years, Kola MMC invested more than RUB 44 million into the melting plant upgrade which resulted in annual decrease of pollution. If in 1998, the year of commissioning of Kola MMC, the melting shop threw 123,3 thousand tons of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, 2012 registered 55 thousand tons level, more than twice as little. Whereas, compared to the peak readings of the Soviet period,  the actual reading is 6 times less.  (E.g. in 1977, the melting shop threw into the atmosphere more than 333 thousand tons of SO2).

It was 24 years ago that Per-Einar Fiskebeck, leader of the Norwegian delegation and chief engineer of the governor office of Finnmark province, visited the melting shop for the first time. Speaking to the press, he noted that the past two decades registered fundamental changes for the better in the ecological situation in Nickel municipality.

The increase of environmental efficiency of an enterprise in operation brings to life another and not less important  task, i.e. recovery of ecological damages accumulated during the Soviet decades of the combine operation. The recovery works started in 2003. In the past decade the Company reclaimed biologically only in Pechenga region 18,5 hectares of terrain, having planted hundreds of trees and bushes.

Apart from this, Kola MMC and state natural reserve Pasvik joined their efforts to build up a modern visiting center of a natural reserve territory in Nickel municipality. The new center will be headquarters for forwarding ecologic education programs to the inhabitants of bordering territories of Russia, Norway and Finland , as well as a platform for scientific forums and other events dedicated to environmental protection.