Emre ÖZKURT
Sales Executive (Refractory Eng.)
Kümaş Refractory
What kind of a scenario we would be faced with, if the waste material wasn’t used as alternative fuel in cement factories:
1. The household and industrial waste materials such as; rubber, paper, plastic, other domestic waste products, solvents, oils, textile waste, fuel waste etc. must have been separated and stored in local government assigned storage facilities. There must have been collection centers established for these waste products to be stored.
2. In these collection centers, all the waste must have been separated into different types and transported to disposal facilities.
3. Since these disposal facilities are in limited numbers, these waste products must have been transported through long distances, via supervised transportation vehicles operated by local officers.
4. Waste disposal facility capacities are also very limited. This would have caused the waste products to wait in these storage units for long periods of time. This, would have constituted a serious threat to the environment. Since this eminent threat would have been there, some sort of precautionary environment protection investments would have been needed.
5. Some of the waste disposal facilities would have established, energy production plants in order to utilize the heat from the disposed materials. This would have required additional investments. The local distribution of the produced energy and its integration to the main system would have added to the investment numbers.
6. The dangerous gases produced in the waste disposal facilities would have needed to be neutralized in the treatment facilities that would have been established with extra investment. The solid waste produced at the end of these processes would have formed mountains of cinder waste that would have needed transportation to the cement factories.
7. In the meantime, the cement factories will release CO2 because they would be using fossil fuel. On the other hand, waste disposal facilities would have been releasing CO2.
8. The process from local storage spaces to disposal units would cause extra costs for the industrial institutions. On top of every product, there would have been extra disposal taxes in order to compensate for the extra expenses mentioned above.
First of all, the usage of alternative waste products as fuel instead of fossil fuel in the cement factories, help reduce the CO2 release. The fuel costs constitutes the 50-55% of the overall cement factory costs. A sizeable portion of this, in calories, is provided from alternative fuels.
On the other hand, gas and dust refinement process is done via rotating furnaces, thus eliminating the costs of building substitutes in the waste disposal facilities. This usage also helps eliminate the sulphur oxide release from the cement factory chimneys. This happens because, the sulphur absorbed in the dust, leaves the system via clinker, which is the raw material of cement.
Almost all the dangerous gases except chlorine, attach to the clinker. For chlorine, there are by-pass systems established in order to keep it in the system and recycle it. The same process is used for heavy metals. Although, dangerous gases cause some problems in the production system, by the help of the creative minds of cement engineering world, they are repurposed while the chemical balances are restored.
The dust heaps in the waste disposal facilities are similar to the cement factory products, this is why they help the clinker production. If there were additional refinements needed, this would have required major investments.
In short, the usage of alternative energy resources in the cement factories, provide benefits in the socio-economic and environmental extents. In addition, it has benefits for the nature and production.
