UrBC, Yekaterinburg, September 1, 2017. Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK) presented its environmental protection projects at Magnitogorsk Environment Photo Exhibition in the city’s local history museum, the company press service reports.

The exhibition opened in the Year of the Environment in Russia. The unique photographic materials display the changes in the city’s environment since the early nineties.

‘Visitors to the exhibition can see how both the environment and our attitude to it kept changing throughout the years. There are three sections to this exhibition: the first one presents 29 photographs of the plant’s metallurgical production, all taken in the eighties. The next section displays some eighty pictures of MMK environmental facilities and lets a visitor get acquainted with MMK experts’ efforts to reduce the plant’s environmental impact. The third section consists of Soviet propaganda posters,’ the press service says.

Chair of Magnitogorsk Town Committee Alexander Morozov said at the opening of the exhibition that things looked much better now than they used to some years before. The decrease in the amount of harmful emissions was so considerable as to get noticed by locals. According to MMK Deputy Head of Environmental Protection Lab Valeriy Kozyulin, MMK used to emit around 1,000,000,000 kg of harmful substances a year back in the late eighties; these days, the figure comes to one-fifth of the amount (200,000,000 kg), and two-thirds of that is carbon monoxide, the least dangerous gas among the by-products of burning.