INSPECT-CEM – Enviromental Inspection Guidelines for the Cement Clinker Industry

Project description and aims

Cement production process is a complex industrial activity that can potentially affects environment with high impacts. Facing different experiences and know-hows demonstrated that monitoring only stack emissions cannot be an efficient control strategy; it’s important to implement an integrated control action that takes into account also production process and technologies adopted, as a stable and controlled process conduction is the first guarantee of compliance assurance.

This project aimed to fix and describe the present know-how in terms of environmental controls on cement factories; it’s aimed to provide a conceptual approach and operative tool to inspectors who have to perform environmental controls in these kind of plants.

The first part of the report focuses on the description of the potential environment threats caused by the cement clinker production, in order to clarify the most relevant issues that need to be controlled by the Authority.

The second part of the report is a description of a guideline for inspection in cement plants; derived from the consideration made in the first part of the report; it follows basic principles of the Recommendation on Minimum Criteria for Environmental Inspections and try to define a minimum set of criteria to plan and perform environmental inspections, in order to help new inspection authorities to improve their specific skills and in general to take to a higher homogeneous degree these controls in the EU member States, including Accession Countries.

In particular two issues have turned to be the most relevant environmental impacts in the cement industry: air emission and use of waste.