Environmental Management

The control of the production site’s environmental impacts requires constant attention.

For that, an environmental management system has been put in place. Several positions devoted entirely to the monitoring of the discharges into the environment have furthermore been created.

Air, water, soil and waste are permanently controlled thanks to the monitoring  and recording systems installed at critical places, such as our aqueous and atmospheric discharges.

Large investments for the environment have also been made in recent years:

• A closing up system placed in our main cooling water discharge, which inflates and retains the water in the event of pollution or fire.
• Automatic samplers that sample the effluents, pro rata to the flow. That enables us to check on a daily basis our proper compliance with the strict standards that are imposed to us by our new environment licence, which was granted in April 2010.
• Moreover, these same effluents are equipped with various measurement probes such as pH, temperature, turbidity and conductivity, which detect and transmit any anomaly in real time, thus enabling us to intervene with minimal delay.
• All the critical chimneys are equipped with a double filtration system that enables us to achieve very low scores in terms of the concentrations and the size of the particles of the discharged dust.
• Moreover, these chimneys are permanently controlled by triboelectric probes which immediately detect the slightest leakage from the upstream safety filter or the slightest crack in one of our process filters.
• An increasingly selective collection of our waste.

The monitoring of the discharges is only one part of good environmental management. The legislative watch is also of paramount importance. We also endeavour to find effective solutions for decreasing our environmental impacts, such as decreasing our water consumption or the quantity of steam used on the site and consequently, the quantity of energy consumed.

All these actions of course take place in concert with all the other departments of the factory.