Fertiliser group Azomures forced to live up to pollution-cut promise

Targu Mures-based fertiliser producer Azomures has reiterated its plans to invest about 203 million Euro by 2015 to modernise its installations to reduce emissions – although the firm failed to live up to a similar promise it made two years ago

April 2010 - From the Print Edition

The Turkish-owned agribusiness will also build a new power station with an installed power capacity amounting to 120 MW.
Azomures is one of the biggest polluters in Romania that agreed, before the country’s EU accession, to make massive investments in its unmodernised equipment.
In 2008 Azomures’s CEO Fuat Kalgay told The Diplomat it would put into action an investment plan amounting to 211 million Euro in upgrading installations mainly its urea and ammonia facilities and constructing a co-generation unit by 2013. Two years later Azomures made a similar announcement, indicating the company has not invested much in the meantime.
In 2009, the National Environment Guard (GNM) gave three fines worth 36,700 Euro to the plant, which is five kilometres from the city centre, for exceeding the maximum ammonia concentration in the emissions released in the air.
The new Minister of Environment, Laszlo Borbely, a resident of Targu Mures, vowed to transform the quality of the air in his hometown and convinced Azomures major shareholders to re-assume their initial investment plan.
Silvian Ionescu, head of the National Environment Guard, told The Diplomat last January that Azomures received in 2007 a full environmental permit from the Cluj County Environment Agency, even if the plant was not respecting all European environmental procedures. Azomures continues to have a large waste dump filled with hazardous chemical substances, which the company promised to clean up by the end of 2009. “For breaking their commitment, the European Commission could decide at any time to start an infringement procedure against Romania,” said Ionescu.