Displaying items by tag: government

China: The Chinese government is set to further restrict imports of metal by-products and scrap in July 2019. The latest rules will control imports of eight types of scrap metal, including copper, aluminium and steel scrap, according to Reuters. Companies that want to continue importing these items will need to apply to the environmental ministry to prove they are in compliance with environmental protection standards. Imports of iron and steel slag were banned at the end of 2018.

US: Vallejo Marine Terminal (VMT) has decided not to appeal against the Vallejo City Council’s decision in 2017 to deny it planning permission to build a marine terminal. VMT and Orcem Americas were planning to build a marine terminal and a slag cement grinding plant, according to the Vallejo Times Herald newspaper in Vallejo, California. Orcem Americas have not commented on the situation but the lack of an import terminal may make building a cement plant unviable, although the site does have rail and road links.

Indonesia: Fajar Harry Sampurno, the State-Owned Enterprises (SOE) Ministry's undersecretary for mining, strategic industries and media affairs, says that the Environment and Forestry Ministry will issue rules stating that mineral waste such as slags resulting from processing nickel and copper ores could be used as raw material for the production of bricks, asphalt, concrete and cement. Mineral waste including copper and nickel slags are currently categorised as hazardous and toxic waste (B3), requiring special handling, according to the Jakarta Post newspaper.

Harjanto, the Industry Ministry's metal, machinery, transportation equipment and electronic industries director general, said the volume of nickel slag, which at present totals 20Mt/yr, would increase ‘sharply’ within the next few years when new mineral smelters currently under construction start operating. The government expects the construction of 31 smelters to be completed by 2021. At the end of 2018 27 smelters were operating, of which 17 are nickel smelters.

US: Councillors at the Vallejo City Council in California are preparing to make a decision on Orcem Americas’ slag cement plant project at the end of May 2019. The council has released a new draft Final Environmental Impact Report (FEIR), according to the Vallejo Times-Herald newspaper. However, staff said the document is not ready to be presented to the council for certification and possible project approval under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) due to a lack of information and cooperation from the applicants for the draft status of the report. Planning permission for the slag grinding plant and marine terminal was refused in early 2017.

US: Residents of Muscatine County, Iowa have asked local government to take action about the use of slag in road construction. The decision follows an investigation by Askew Scientific Consulting into whether heavy metals were present in the slag, according to WQAD television. Data from the study was sent to the Iowa Department of Public Health, which concluded that high levels of manganese might cause adverse health effects from regular exposure to slag and slag dust. The county started using slag to repair and maintain roads in 2008.

Askew Scientific Consulting used samples and data from SSAB, the company that supplies the slag. However, SSAB has said that samples used in the study were taken earlier in the slag-making process, not from slag ready to be used on the road, and pose a limited health risk to people.

China: The Ministry of Ecology and Environment has accused the Gaoyi Iron and Steel Company in Yuncheng in Shanxi province of illegally and dumping steel slag over a 10 year period. The ministry has named the steel producer as part of an initiative to name and shame industrial polluters, according to Reuters. The steel producer was ordered in 2013 to build a slag treatment yard but it failed to do so. So far in 2018 it has produced 0.3Mt of steel slag. Most of this has been dumped on nearby farmland.

US: Xavier Becerra, the attorney general of California, has warned that Orcem Americas’ proposed slag cement plant in Vallejo breaks state environmental laws. In a letter to Vallejo's planning and development services co-ordinator he said that the project would violate the California Environmental Quality Act, according to the Irish Times newspaper. Becerra also raised issues with nitrogen oxide and CO₂ emissions. The intervention is an unusual move, as the state's attorney generals do not normally intervene in planning disputes.

Orcem Americas’ chief executive officer (CEO) Stephen Bryant said that a new environmental impact report would be prepared to address Becerra’s concernsd by the end of November 2018. The company, a subsidiary of Ireland’s Ecocem, is proposing to build and operate a US$50m slag grinding plant in Vallejo. However, the project has faced opposition from local environmental groups.

Germany: Loesche says it is continuing its research and development of a process to create a steel slag suitable for cement production following a legal dispute.

The engineering company has worked with the FA Finger-Institut für Baustoffkunde (FIB) at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar on the thermally reductive modification of steel slags for recycling iron and manufacturing ‘steelworks clinker.’ It has developed two procedures for thermally reductive conditioning of BOF (Basic Oxygen Furnace) slag that have been registered for a patent, which largely differ in the respective cooling process for the remaining molten metal. The individual stages of the procedure have already been tried and tested on an industrial scale. Loesche’s partner for the entire procedure is Primetals Technologies based in Linz, Austria, which has industrial-scale plants for reduction and fast cooling based on patented procedures in its product range. The remaining iron (approximately 8 - 10%) that is still in the ‘steelwork clinker’ can then be separated in a Loesche mill. The separation procedure for this, which has also been patented by Loesche, has been in operation for approximately six years to recycle stainless steel from stainless steel slags in a recycling plant in Belgium.

However, following smelting trials conducted with the Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung (BAM) in 2011, Loesche faced a lawsuit regarding the patents for its procedures. The legal uncertainty that this created led to the suspension of further development and implementation of the two procedures for more than three years. The legal dispute was resolved in December 2017. The second conditioning procedure – the fast cooling – was assigned as the sole property of Loesche. A third of the ownership of the first conditioning procedure - slow cooling – was conceded to the BAM, represented by the German government.

Loesche now plans to implement the second procedure into industrial practice.

China/Japan: Chinese customs have returned 14,100t of imported non-ferrous slag back to Japan the General Administration of Customs has said. The products were declared as iron oxide and iron powder, according to Reuters. However, they were found to be iron sludge and non-ferrous slag. These by-products have faced an import ban since the beginning of 2018.

China: The Ministry of Ecology and Environment has banned imports of steel slag from the end of 2018. It is part of 16 scrap metal and chemical waste products, according to Reuters. A further 16 items will be banned by the end of 2019. The government’s crackdown on waste imports is part of a ‘war on pollution.’