Vladimir Denisov

International Academy of Ecology, Man and Nature Protection Sciences was set up in 1995. Its promoters are the Ministry of Nuclear Energy of Russia, state services of mine & technical and nuclear supervision and leading ecological scientists. Viktor Rogalev, dr. of sc.(eng.), prof., is the president. The head office is in St.Petersburg. The organization‘s structure is composed of branches existing in the UK, USA, Germany, Greece, Czechia, Ukraine, China, Central Asian states. In Russia there are two branches: in the town of Sosnovyi Bor (near St.Petersburg) and in the town of Kolchugino.

    The collective labor agreement for 2002 signed by the management of Kolchugino Non-Ferrous Metals Machining Plant JSC and the trade union‘s leaders for the first time includes an ecological section. The management is obliged to finance an implementation of new treatment technologies applied to industrial water and air, to install up-to-date environment control devices and to begin an attestation of jobs for level of noise, shatter, electromagnetic oscillations, radiation, harmful chemical action. This part of the collective agreement is aimed at the achievement of ecological safety of production operations at large and each job separately.

Kolchugino Non-Ferrous Metals Processing Plant JSK.New complex alloys shop

To know a worth of this novation, one must comprehend how the Russian nonferrous metals industry affect the environment. This sector accounts for 20 % of all industrial air emissions and 6 % of water effluents in general. Soil is contaminated everywhere. The gas content in shop‘s atmosphere is high: the worker with a respirator or gauze mask on his face is a usual view.
Emissions to air of harmful substances in the form of gas or small solid particles – sulfur dioxide, copper and nickel dust, etc. – have the most tangible effect on environment. Toxic impurities – copper, fluorine, zinc, tungsten, molybdenum, arsenic, i.e, elements of highly-dangerous category – are in water effluents of nonferrous metals plants.
This situation has been forming during decades. At many plants facilities and technologies are obsolete, their updating not started in time escalated into a complicated problem from technical and investment viewpoint.
Kolchugino Non-Ferrous Metals Machining Plant JSC has elaborated one of the first special ecological programs in the sector. It was worked out under the auspices of International Academy of Ecology, Man and Nature Protection Sciences. This approach became possible only lately.
The decade of reforms was a crucial stage in the 130-year history of the plant. By 1996 it had lost previous business ties. The follow-up was a dramatic production decline.
Nikolai Mochalov became the plant‘s head in 1996. He, a doctor of sciences (engineering), a holder of five patents, re-arranged the plant‘s work, restructured the production operations. New facilities appeared, for example, a German line of copper tubes finishing for snails and ordered coils to be produced. The plant‘s specialists developed a production process for seamless brass and copper-nickel tubes for heat-exchangers. Within a short time, the plant removed old mills and presses. The band rolling operations were concentrated in a new shop. In the old casting shop, a scrap pre-sorting department was set up which resulted in economic savings and ensured a normal furnace utilization rate in the new casting operations. The managers succeeded in establishing ties with suppliers and customers. The output tonnage started to grow.

General view of deactivating module

The commissioning of the new facilities made it possible to take a rigorous approach to ecological problems. The plant‘s specialists, jointly with ecologists, developed radically new nonferrous metals casting and processing technologies. The fact that only one shop, with state-of-the-art facilities, out of three old shops was left in the flat rolled products complex is an indicator of the level of changes. The smelting shop is the most polluting one at the plant. Here the main bulk of harmful emissions and effluents is produced. There are two conventional ways of air treatment for removal of toxic elements – sorption and oxidizing. However, neither one nor the other was effective in the large-capacity Kolchugino production operations. A simple profitable treatment technique based on direct use of electric power in the intensification of physicochemical processes was found. For this, different types of gas discharge can be used. Low-temperature plasma of barrier discharge meets the requirements of the situation to a larger extent. Its variety of elementary processes stimulates different-type physicochemical transformations of complex molecules which phenomenon is not observed in ordinary conditions. In doing so, a treatment technique was established on the basis of which a unified device was made – a low-temperature plasma-based deactivation module.
The module was tested in the casting shop. Here filtration abilities of different materials were also studied. The experiments carried out during smelting and casting showed that gas-and-air flows were effectively deactivated when filter basalt fabric in conjunction with the low-temperature plasma discharge module was applied. At present, a pilot plant of this type set up by the plant‘s specialists is already operating.
The same approach was applied while selecting the most effective technique of cleaning water effluents from heavy metals ions. As a rule, two methods – reagent or electrochemical – are applied in nonferrous metals industry. During the investigation, various combinations of these methods were tried, and such combination of them was found with the help of which the activity of hydroxides formed during electrolysis was improved and the passivity of electrode surface was lowered. In this way, high quality of deactivated water was reached, even with big variations of initial concentration of heavy metals ions. Now, a stationary unit for complex treatment of water effluents has been set up at the plant.
The Kolchugino process originality is the recycling of a large tonnage of nonferrous metals scrap. The radiation control service checks the entry secondary materials and finished products. The personnel of the plant‘s ecological center, jointly with the scientists from Military University of Radiation, Chemical & Biological Protection (Moscow), studied radiation-shielding properties of special fabrics. It is already evident that some fabrics can be used as packing materials for temporary storage and transportation of radioactive waste to landfill sites.
The ecological program under implementation at the Kolchugino Plant has already yielded good results. In the opinion of Nikolai Mochalov, ecology is the activities line that, by increasing human & nature security in metals production operations, helps to solve other problems: improve business efficiency and increase competitiveness of products.

R   E   F   E   R   E   N   C   E Kolchugino Non-Ferrous Metals Machining Plant was founded in 1871 by Merchant Alexandr Kolchugin as a copper & brass plant for cartridge caps making. The town grown around the plant was named after its founder. Now the plant produces rolled products and tubes from heavy non-ferrous metals and alloys for many industrial sectors, coining band, consumer goods. Since 1999, an ecological center that united separate groups dealing with environment and man protection has been working at the plant.

The town of Kolchugino is becoming one of the cleanest towns of the Vladimir Region. Meanwhile, it is situated in the historical center of Russia where the concentration of industrial operations and, consequently, the level of harmful emissions are high. The Kolchugino plant leads the way of a modern approach towards the solution of ecological problems.