At the end of July 2023, the ‘Performance Excellence Awards’ were announced within ArcelorMittal Europe – Flat Products. ArcelorMittal Belgium was in the top 3 in almost all categories. For the ‘operational excellence’ category, the sinter plants team took home gold with a project to significantly reduce dust emissions.
In recent years there has been strong investment in new dedusting systems for sinter plant 2. Just think of the new sleeve filter in 2017 or the flue gas recirculation in 2021. At the end of 2022, we examined how we could further reduce our dust footprint with our existing facilities.
In the past, the main focus was on the dust emissions from our plants in normal, stable operating conditions, but now we also wanted to address dust emissions in non-regular situations, such as during a shutdown or a restart of a plant after a downtime. We considered all installations with environmental impact: the sleeve filter, the flue gas recirculation, and the “bypass” for the residual gas. We wanted to improve the safety, (dedusting) capacity and operational reliability of all these installations by looking for synergies between them. As a result, our dust footprint has been reduced by more than 60%, while also significantly reducing or even avoiding visual disturbance during a downtime was significantly reduced or even avoided. This benefits our own employees, contractors, and neighbours.
