UrBC, Yekaterinburg, March 1, 2016. Russian Copper Company invested some 13.37bn RUR in upgrades and retooling of its Karabashmed in 2004-2015, with 90% of the money directed to environmental protection and reclamation projects, the company press service reports.

‘Karabash is a town the company management has been paying special attention to, as the city’s environmental condition was for many years the locals’ most serious concern. Today, the most up-to-date and efficient gas filtering, emission-trapping facilities have been installed at Karabashmed, which improved the quality of local air considerably. The enterprise used to emit some 160,000,000 kg of sulfur dioxide a year in the Soviet times, but thanks to Russian Copper Company’s efforts, the figure is now thirty times smaller, and is expected to go down even more,’the press service says.

Karabash’s only metallurgical enterprise was set up in 1910, with no one around to care about the cleanliness or safety of production processes throughout most of the century. SO2 used to be emitted with no filtering whatsoever and used to poison the air the locals had to breathe.