Cement giant seeks permission to use more toxic waste, relax pollution rules
Opponents urge Environment Ministry to reject Nesher factory’s bid to use more dangerous waste and metals in fuel, raw materials
Sue Surkes is The Times of Israel's environment reporter
Environmental activists and residents living on Israel’s central plain are fighting attempts by Israel’s massive Nesher cement plant to bring in bigger quantities of toxic waste, comprising more heavy metals, and to get the Environmental Protection Ministry to sign off on a revised and relaxed emissions permit.
The factory, near the city of Ramle, produces around four million tons of clinker (calcium silicates ground up for use as a binder in many cement products) and around five million tons of cement each year. It operates two furnaces for clinker production and seven plants for cement production.
Nesher Israel Cement Enterprises was given in 2014 an emissions permit through 2021. Around 18 months ago, it submitted a request to the Environmental Protection Ministry for changes to the permit. It wants a green light to replace some of its raw materials with waste that is similar in composition, and to use more waste as fuel for the furnaces to reduce dependence on petcoke (petroleum coke). Petcoke, derived from fossil fuels, has a higher energy content than coal, but emits 30 to 80 percent more carbon dioxide into the air when burned.
At a public hearing last week, opponents of the plan stated that the ministry’s draft revised permit ran contrary to the 2008 Clean Air Act and its associated regulations.
Arie Vanger, responsible for air-related issues at the environmental advocacy organization Adam Teva V’Din, wrote in an opinion that the moves to change the permit were “especially problematic when it concerns a huge plant with significant emissions located close to a large population in the heart of the country. The Nesher plant in Ramle processes hundreds of tons of raw materials, consumes dozens of tons of fuel of various kinds and emits millions of cubic meters of air containing pollutants every hour.”
During the first half of last year, Nesher exceeded permitted mercury emissions 19 times. According to the World Health Organization, inhaling mercury vapor can harm the nervous, digestive and immune systems, lungs and kidneys, and can be fatal.
Vanger noted that once mercury enters the air, it also enters the food chain and that Israel was a signatory to the 2013 Minamata Convention on Mercury, which aims to cut human-induced emissions of the metal.
Taking data from the Environment Ministry’s emissions register, he argued that Nesher already pumps into the air more mercury than all of Israel’s coal-fired power stations combined.
The request for increased emissions of metals such as cadmium, lead, copper and arsenic was “particularly infuriating,” he added.
And yet the documents accompanying the request for permit changes reflected no effort to evaluate the expected emissions of dangerous metals such as mercury, volatile organic compounds, dioxins and furans, nor to calculate the extent to which these emissions would be dispersed in the environment.
He demanded testing be carried out to determine what combinations of toxic waste could be permitted. In this he was echoed and amplified by other voices at the public hearing that called for epidemiological testing of respiratory disease among children in the area and a pilot project that would track the concentration of metals in the air.
Benayahu Bar-Yosef, from the Institute of Soil, Water and Environmental Sciences at Israel’s Agricultural Research Organization, said that over the last decade, Nesher had become a facility for dealing with different kinds of health-endangering waste, such as ground up tires, solid municipal trash, coal dust and petcoke, and the revised permit would allow it to add even more varieties such as contaminated soil, sludge from sewage treatment plants and fuel waste from the new natural gas drilling rigs.
Noting that one of the first moves of the new Environment Minister Gila Gamliel was to freeze a massive program to build incinerators for general waste while she reviews waste policy in general, Benjamin Ruggill, general secretary of Kibbutz Gezer, some 6 kilometers (3.5 miles) away from the plant, said that the new draft permit “essentially says, burn what you want.”
Residents had the right to know how much mercury would enter the air and whether the levels were safe, he told The Times of Israel.
Nesher says on its website page that issues of sustainability and environment receive considerable attention at all stages of production and management. “As part of this trend, the intake of alternative raw materials and alternative fuels takes place only after rigorous laboratory tests to ensure conformity of the material to both the production process and regulatory requirements,” it writes.
In a statement to the Times of Israel, it said, “As is customary in the global cement industry, the Nesher plant in Ramle uses raw materials and alternative fuels, thus minimizing the use of natural resources and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The changes in the emissions permit will allow Nesher to continue promoting environmental solutions, without any increase in emissions to the air. It is sad to see the level of populist discourse on the issue, especially from those who should be promoting an environmental agenda.”
Over the past few years, Nesher — which controls around half the country’s cement market and is owned by the Ukraine-born American-English multi-billionaire Len Blavatnik — has been locked in a battle with importers of cement, mainly from Greece and Turkey. That battle burst onto the public agenda on Friday when Economy Minister Amir Peretz announced that the tariff on imported cement would rise from 0.25 percent to 17.25%, citing a need to protect local producers. Finance Minister Israel Katz, who must approve such a move, blasted the approach as “completely opposite to my worldview, which espouses competition, is against monopolies and supports lowering the cost of living.”
