Displaying items by tag: Sustainability

France: Lafarge France has launched its Lafarge 360 initiative. The scheme aims to aid specifiers, contractors and builders make low-carbon structures through reducing CO₂ emissions, preserving natural resources and responsible innovation. It will start the initiative by proving a Lafarge 360 score on its associated digital platform to allow customers to assess the environmental impact of Lafarge’s products. By providing a rating of A to D the tool will offer information on the concrete types.

Italy: Buzzi Unicem says that its Unical subsidiary is the first national concrete producer to earn silver level RSS certification from the Concrete Sustainability Council. The accreditation asserts that a company meets criteria for sustainable practices and operates in a sustainable, environmentally positive manner. Unical’s Strada Berlia concrete batching plant in Turin received the certification in June 2019. The CSC procedure also included certifying the cement produced by Buzzi Unicem’s Robilante Cement plant and the aggregates from Ceretto quarry. The certificate was issued by ICMQ, the Italian Certification Body member of CSC. Unical manages more than 100 concrete plants in Italy.

Japan: Taiheiyo Cement has set an 80% CO₂ reduction target from cement production by 2050. It also plans to reduce its emissions from cement products by 20%. It aims to do this via a variety of means including energy-saving measures, promoting co-processing, lowering the clinker factor of its cement and CO₂ capture technology. The cement producer started a pilot of a chemical absorption method on kiln exhaust gases at its Fujiwara plant in early 2019.

Bangladesh: Shahab Uddin, the Minister for Environment, Forest and Climate Change, says that five cement plants near the Sundarbans mangrove forest region have been granted environmental clearance certification. The plants are Meghna Cement Mills, Bashundhara Cement Mills, Mongla Cement Mills, Dubai-Bangla Cement Mills and Holcim (Bangladesh), according to the New Nation newspaper. Uddin said that the units were all at least 6km away from the Sundarbans reserved forest area and that the Department of Environment was monitoring their emissions on a regular basis. In 1995 the government declared a 10km area around the Sundarbans Reserve Forest as a ‘critical’ ecological zone.

China: Huaxin Cement emitted 1.4Mt of CO₂ equivalent in 2018. About 60% of this came from process emissions from making clinker and about 30% came from burning fossil fuels. Additional emissions arose from electrical consumption.

The cement producer says that it implemented a variety of emission control and sustainability initiatives in 2018. These included improving its energy saving management, rollout of waste-heat recovery systems and other plant upgrades. It is also promoting so-called ‘green’ products. In January 2019 its Huaxin Fortune brand 42.5R grade Ordinary Portland Cement obtained low carbon product certification from the China Quality Certification Center.

India: Cement producers and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) have launched the Indian Cement Sector SDG Roadmap. The planning framework uses the United Nation’s (UN) sustainable development goals (SDG) to set a series of goals in energy and climate, people and communities, the circular economy and natural resource management. It is intended to contribute to the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

This initiative has been convened by nine cement companies: ACC, Ambuja Cement, CRH, Dalmia Cement (Bharat), Heidelberg Cement, Shree Cement, Orient Cement, UltraTech Cement, Votorantim Cimentos. It is also partially funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).

Notable goals from the roadmap include promoting railway and waterway transport networks, improving transport safety, increasing the use of blended cements and encouraging the use of alternative fuels. The framework also plans to increase the number of women in the indsutry workforce at every level from entry to board.

Japan: Taiheiyo Cement says it agrees with the recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). It is promoting research and development business strategies to mitigate and adapt to climate change. The cement producer is also intending to publish a long-term plan to reduce its CO₂ emissions by 2050.

India: UltraTech Cement aims to increase contribution of so-called ‘green energy’ to 25% of its total power consumption by 2021 from 10% at present. It also intends to raise its contribution of renewable energy to its total power consumption by five times in the next two years to 2021 to over 10%. By building capacity for renewable power the cement producer intends to become one of the largest users of renewable energy in the Indian cement sector.

In addition to renewable energy, the green energy contribution includes energy generated through waste heat recovery systems (WHR). During its 2019 financial year UltraTech commissioned 28MW of WHR systems to take its total generation from WHR to 8% of total power consumption. Further upgrades are expected to be completed in a phased manner by 2021, taking its WHR share to 15% of its total power requirement.

“To bring the cement sector in line with the Paris Agreement on climate change, UltraTech Cement’s annual emissions will need to fall by at least 16% by 2030. There are a number of solutions for reducing emissions associated with cement production as identified by the latest Low Carbon Technology Roadmap published by International Energy Agency (IEA) in partnership with Cement Sustainability Initiative (CSI). These solutions need to be deployed at scale to meet the decarbonisation challenge,” said K K Maheshwari, the managing director of UltraTech Cement.

UltraTech Cement has set a target to reduce its CO₂ emissions by 25% from its 2005 – 2006 level by 2021. The company is also working on CO₂ reduction strategies including energy efficiency, alternative fuels, WHR, renewable energy and reducing its clinker ratio.

There was a glimmer of good news visible through the Delhi smog this week with the launch of a market-based emissions trading scheme (ETS) for particulate matter (PM). A pilot has started at Surat in Gujarat. The scheme will apply to 350 industries in the locality and it will be scrutinised for wider rollout in the country.

China robustly started to tackle its industrial PM emitters a few years ago although the work remains on-going. In its wake India has increasingly made the wrong sort of headlines with horrifically high dust emissions. Delhi, for example, reportedly had PM2.5 emissions of over 440µg/m³ in January 2019. To give this some context, the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) annual upper guideline figure for safe human exposure is 10µg/m³. Research by the Financial Times newspaper suggested that more than 40% of the Indian population is subject to annual PM2.5 emissions of over 50µg/m³.

Air Quality Life Index (AQLI) research reckons that if India were able to meet its national PM2.5 standard of 40µg/m³ then its population would live 1.8 years longer or 4.3 years longer if it met the WHO guideline level. The current situation is an unnecessary tragedy. In strictly structural terms the country’s productivity is being thrown away by damaging the health of its workforce. For comparison amongst other major cement producing countries, AQLI data placed China’s PM2.5 emissions at 39µg/m³, Indonesia at 22µg/m³, Vietnam at 20µg/m³ the US at 9µg/m³. These figures cover all industries in different conditions and climates. If the US can do it, why not the others?

Back on trading schemes, the famous ETS at the moment is the European one for CO₂ emissions. Similar schemes are slowly appearing around the world as governments look at what the European Union (EU) did right and wrong. For example, South Africa started up a carbon tax in early June 2019. Yet as the supporting documents by the Gujarat Pollution Control Board (GPCB) point out there have been a variety of ETS systems’ over the years. The US’s Acid Rain Program is generally seen to have achieved significant reductions in SO2 and NOx emissions although the National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAP) has continued this work. Chile even ran its own PM ETS in the 1990s although the outcomes have been disputed.

One problem with a CO₂ ETS, and anthropomorphic or man-made climate change in general, is that it is intangible. Even if sea levels deluge major coastal cities, rising mean temperatures reduce agricultural yields and human populations contract sharply, people will still be arguing over the research and the causes. The beauty of a PM ETS is that if it works you can literally see and feel the results. A famous example here is the UK’s Clean Air Act in the 1950s that banished the fog/smog that London used to be famous for.

The Gujarat PM ETS is a pilot, the results of which will be considered by researchers from a number of US-based universities and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. Explicitly, the study plans to use a randomised control trial to compares its results against the command and control style approach used in the rest of the country. On the cement-side various Indian news stories have emerged as state pollution boards have increasingly started fining producers for emission limit breaches. Clearly the government is taking dust emissions seriously. Reduction is long overdue.

Nigeria: Dangote Cement has published its first sustainability report following Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standards. Key data from the report include a CO₂ emissions per tonne of cementitious material of 687kg CO₂/t across all operations. Its total CO₂ emissions were 16.4Mt. In 2017 it reported estimated total CO₂ emissions of 8.45Mt from its domestic operations. The cement producer had an energy consumption of 52M GJ 2018. It had a 49% production capacity utilisation rate at its Nigerian plants. The group said that it supported 37,000 direct, indirect and induced jobs in Nigeria.