UrBC, Yekaterinburg, June 6, 2017. Representatives of the Natural Resources Committee’s local division, Novokuznetsk’s Prosecutor-General for environmental issues, social activists, and reporters all went on a tour of EVRAZ Holding’s West-Siberian Integrated Metallurgical Works (ZSMK) within the framework of the Environmental Troopers Project, EVRAZ Holding Siberia’s Corporate Relations Center reports.

Visitors to the plant could take a look at the company’s current environmental protection programs at work and learn about the measures taken to conserve local bodies of water, reduce harmful atmospheric emissions, and recycle metallurgical production waste.

‘During their tour of the premises, the visitors could see a sludge decantation unit for the converter shops’ gas-filtering facilities. The by-product of steel-smelting process, the sludge gets filtered in several stages, with the purified water then going back to production and the dried sludge reused. As a result, our sludge depository now has 3,406 m3 less sludge to handle than in the year 2014,’ the Center says.

The ‘Environmental Troopers’ also went to a converter slag recycling unit that can recycle 100% of steel-smelting production waste to make iron-containing stuff that can get reused in the production process. This makes it possible to buy fewer raw materials such as metallurgical concentrate, pellets, or scrap metal from external suppliers.